EVE New Citizens Q&A

Skiff can easily fit a battleship class tank in the 100K EHP range. Gankers are unlikely to bother you unless it is personal.

[Skiff, Skiff]
Damage Control II
Mining Laser Upgrade II
Mining Laser Upgrade II

Adaptive Invulnerability Field II
EM Ward Amplifier II
Adaptive Invulnerability Field II
Medium Shield Extender II
Survey Scanner II

Modulated Strip Miner II, Plagioclase Mining Crystal II
Modulated Strip Miner II, Plagioclase Mining Crystal II


Medium Core Defense Field Extender II
Medium Core Defense Field Extender II

This fit has 101,080 EHP with my skills according to EFT (not updated for latest changes - I manually added the second strip miner)

Personally I use a tanked Procurer, which gives an EHP around 65,000 but at a fraction of the cost of the Skiff. That tends to make it even less attractive to gankers. However, it's a personal choice. The main thing is to avoid the squishy ships, be spacewise, avoid going afk, and of course avoid the assumption that hi-sec = safe.

Never considered Null-Sec before thanks for the advice, I like the whole industrial/mining thing as I really aint very good at PVP even though I know its what EVE is all abt.... I don't AFK mine never have .. But I suppose if heading for Null-sec then you really have to be in a corp for support if nothing else.

I've mined in highsec and nullsec. Not really a fan of nullsec mining because you need to maintain situational awareness - at least in my part of null and I prefer to multitask, work on other things while my ore hold fills. These days, I buy most of my minerals but occasionally mine in highsec with 2 skiffs - one pilot has a Foreman mindlink so I harvest a lot of ore without a lot of effort. The station where I refine is 1 or 2 AU distant so it takes less than a minute to offload and return to the belt.

Bring a book or a second monitor. You don't want to cover up local with whatever you're doing to keep from going insane.

Other strategies for dealing with gankers:
Mine in the middle of nowhere. Amarr space is usually pretty quiet, not many barge gankers around.
A lot of Amarr dead-end systems away from trade hubs are so quiet, you could probably get away with jetcan mining. If you do that, make sure you bring a properly PvP-fit combat ship and know how to use it, just in case someone decides they want your ore.

For those who insist on mining in highsec, I strongly advocate to mine in level 1 Security missions. A number of them have asteroids in them, and for the L1 Security missions, you can clear them in a frigate.

The three big perks with this are:

1. Gankers will have to combat scan you down. This makes you significantly less attractive as a gank target, assuming they even know you're there. DScanning for combat probes will keep you pretty safe in this regard.
2. Many of the missions (and their asteroids) are behind acceleration gates. If you aren't scanning for combat probes, you can drop your DScan down to ~500k km in order to have your in-gate on DScan, and not much else. If something that isn't you, an alt, or a mate, show up, they're probably there to gank you.
3. The belts in missions are significantly healthier than anything in a "public" belt, and if you play your cards right, you can have it respawn at full health each day at downtime for up to seven days. Many of the asteroids are large enough that you can fill a Retriever's hold (with split lasers) and still have some left over in space.

EUNI's wiki on Mission Mining: http://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Mission_Mining

Barring any of that, then I, too, shall echo the positive sentiments towards Providence and Provibloc. They're a fun bunch of buggers and it's not a bad place to get your sea legs under you.