EVE New Citizens Q&A

You risk getting blown up every time you undock. The only way to completely avoid that risk is to stay docked.

To make blowing you up unprofitable, you can make sure that the potential gains (value of the cargo you are carrying) is less than the cost of ships needed to gank you. There is no hard limit to this, but the generally accepted values are 50-100M for a TI industrial (depending on how you tank it), or 1b for a freighter. If you're moving fitted ships, you should be fine flying a ship and its fitting - unless you use expensive items, such as faction or officer modules.

Alternatively, going back to the first line, you can issue a public courier contract, and have someone else take the risk for you.

Regarding actual hauling and not simply avoiding hauling something that gets you blown up.

-- Never autopilot, always warp to zero

-- Make sure your calculated route stays in high sec

-- Be aware of big gank-centric events like the burn Jita thing, avoid those systems

-- Check your map statistics for lots of kills on major market routes, etc, avoid those (note: there are other reasons for high-sec systems to have lots of kills, like FW and RvB).

That and a ship properly fit to align relatively quickly will keep almost everyone off your back. Sure, people can still instalock and scan you, but can they instalock, scan you, and read over your cargo manifest to see if you're worth blowing up? No. So that only leaves people blowing ships up completely at random, which frankly you can't do anything about.

(As a new player I don't see how you'd have a freighter or orca, so that's not really an issue.)

Finally, if you need a /lot/ hauled, there are freight corps, like Red Frog Freight, who will move stuff in highsec, for some isk per jump. They're a little more expensive than a public contract, but more reliable (due to reputation loss if they steal it).

Just set the collateral to the value of your cargo

I will reiterate some points:

• Pushing the undock button means putting your ship in danger, regardless of circumstance. You need to be okay with that every time you undock. That's what "don't fly what you can't afford to lose" means.
• Don't autopilot. The autopilot warps you to 15 km form a gate and then slowly approaches it, giving any ganker ample time to kill you if you're carrying something valuable.
• Gankers will seldom gank you if they can't profit from it. If you're carrying 100 mil ISK worth of stuff, and since half of everything usually drops, nobody will gank you if it costs them more than 50 mil ISK to do it.
• Fly frigates. They are fast and few ships can even lock them in time on gates before they warp.
• Be wary of wars and lowsec.

As a new player, you are unlikely to be hauling anything that would really warrant a gank for awhile.(Unless you sold a PLEX and fill an industrial with 500 million worth of goods)

If you are transporting smaller quantities of goods (Less than 500 m3) consider a high-cargo frigate like the Probe.

For larger stuff, you are generally safe in an industrial as long as the total value is less than 50 million.

For really small, high-value stuff (Implants, Blueprints) I use a shuttle due to its near-instant align time.

When using a T1 industrial, tank it. Medium shield extenders and active hardeners. Fire up your hardeners when undocking in crowded areas. While this tank won't make you immune to ganking by a long margin, it may save your ship on borderline cases. (A tornado alpha is going to fry you regardless, but you might survive a Destroyer alpha long enough for concord to save you). A T1 shield tank isn't too expensive.

If you don't trust yourself to move the goods safely and you don't mind spending extra, I agree that courier contracts are the way to go. Just be reasonable with the collateral and fee. Nobody is going to want to pony up 1 billion isk to move something 14 jumps for a meager 1 million payment at the end.

I would also make a hauler alt, and keep them in the NPC corporation.

This is mostly useful for war decs against your corp. If and when your corporation gets war decced, then all your in-corp industrial ships can be fired upon without CONCORD intervening. An NPC corp can never be war decced.

Otherwise, you have to figure that for a high-sec Pirate or ganker to destroy your ship, your cargo has to be worth more than the ship he will lose when CONCORD destroys them. I think Destroyers are popular ships for this, since they are cheap and have a high damage output.

As others have said, you can tank your T1 Hauler. That means shields in the mid slots on a Mammoth or a Badger, and maybe some warp core stabilzers in the low slots so you can't be warp scrambled. Inertia stabilizers help your ship to align faster, which means it can warp faster.

Also, industrials on autopilot are what gankers look for. In order to gank your ship, high sec pirates will normally scan your cargo to see if you are carrying anything worth losing their ship over. If you are on autopilot, your ship sits outside of each warp gate and slowly approaches it, which is a big red flag saying 'gank me!'. If you manually pilot to zero, most high sec pirates will never get the chance to scan you or even lock you.

You could also carry cargo in ships other than industrial ships, as others have mentioned. Frigates like the probe are good, but also some cruisers. Expanded Cargohold IIs in the low slots are pretty useful in this regard.