Ships & Modules

tough ship to really do much missioning with.

You could look at the Amarr assault frigs, they are not hard to skill into once you have CovOps trained.

Since when is an '08 character "fairly new to Eve"? Either you bought your char or you're just trolling.

I agree with posters above- the use of cloaks at least for level 1-4 PvE is not terribly useful. The idea in missions is rather just a mob of enemiies- solo cloak ships are more of a single, high priority target killer. For the vast majority of missions, simply tanking damage forever so you can wipe out an entire fleet of enemies single handed- is the name of the game. Once you decloak in a mission, you will just be targeted by 20 ships, negating the use of your cloak anyhow.

For high end belt ratting, PvP both combat and intelligence gathering/scouting- cloaky ships are a real factor. Missions are better served with just another weapon in the high slot to increase the speed at which NPC's die.
The other problem with missions in a Cov Ops, such as the Stealth Bomber- is that they focus on killing large ships, which are absent in missions until you are at a point where you will probably be using a larger vessel for it's inherent HP and DPS potentials.

Cov Ops certainly can be used PvE, and solo at that. But it's really not the best use of the ship type. Anything on the lower spectrum of missions will also take a decade of running to pay for themselves versus a much less expensive T1. Lower end PvE is mostly about burning thru missions quickly, so for that I suggest cheap, loot out-fitted, T1 ships of the appropriate class. Once I had a few skills, running any mission given the appropriate level of ship (frig for lvl 1, etc) was child's play and rarely required more than target-orbit-shoot tactics. So T2 ships and modules, at least up to lvl 4's, seem an expensive overkill option.