Ships & Modules

Or is this just how it is in PvP until you've trained skills for a month or two? I do about 55-60 dps, and survive for about 3-5 shots depending on who is shooting me.

Flying a condor or a kestrel, T1 missile/rocket launchers, small shield extender, afterburner, ballistics control and damage control. We typically fly within range of each other, and they kill me. When I'm in the condor, I try to stay at range but they chase me down.

Took a look at your losses. First of all. Some of them were lost to slicers (which can do high dps against other frigs at range) and algos (which has strong drones to use against frigates) so you were already fighting an uphill battle. That being said, there is still room for much improvements on your fit. Generally you want to fill all slots on your ship. With a few exceptions. Highslots can be hard to fill so as long as you got as many launchers as the ship can fit it should be fine. Rigs can also quickly be expensive for a new player, but they do make a great improvement. And in pvp situations you really want to have tackle modules (warp scramblers, warp distruptors and webs) to have the ability to hold your enemy.

When it comes to module sizes then shield extenders (along with shield boosters and other stuff) can be confusing. Medium shield extenders are meant for frigates while small ones are useless. So if you want a strong tank then fit a medium shield extender.

When flying a condor with light missiles your main strength is the ability to do damage at range, so staying at range is a great defense. However an afterburner isn't fast enough for that so consider fitting a micro warp drive.

Medium shield extendors and mwd take up a lot of powergrid so you will need to fit a micro auxillary power core in a lowslot to increase your powergrid. In addition it is a great idea to train up your fitting skills (skills that increase pg and cpu).

That's some great advice, thank you. What about increasing my DPS? I'm doing 40-60 dps, and it feels like I should do more. Are there modules I should equip to increase that, or is that about right?

for a nice 10% boost on your dps you can use faction missile, they are the way to go for pvp, they are expensive but they are well worth it dont bring many of them just fill your launchers with faction ammo and bring T1 spare in your cargo, but probably you will be dead before you get to reload anyway.
other than that best thing you can do to increase your dps its to train missile related skill since you already use ballistic control system (BCS), or tane a look at missile rigs they are pretty cheap and give some decent boosts even if its less than BCS.

40-60 dps it's pretty low but if you fight in fleets doing dps isn't exactly your job you should focuse more on tackling stuff and let the others with bigger ships do the dps race, even if you get to the point where you can deal 100-150 dps with a condor and that's with max skills, T2 fit, T2 ammo etc it's not gonna make a big difference when a single cruiser can do 400-700 dps, it helps but dps just isn't a T1 standard frigate job.
if you are flying solo just dont bother untill you have good skills or you know you are going to fight someone with similar skills as yours.

i dont know what game you are playing but in the EVE i play there is no way a atron could do 400dps or a enyo 600dps

That is true but incomplete. After Empyrean Age II they added "weapon grouping" to make the old hamsters happy. That had the side-effect that the hamsters didn't need anti-depressants anymore and anything with small plates or extenders were doom to die.

Well I'm not quite that old as player. Thanks for the history lessons though. Ugggh 8 gun ships without weapon grouping? Must've been laborious times.

Also remember, frigates main job is tackling not dealing lots of dps, exceptions being blaster frigates and stealth bombers.

BEst thing you can do is join a corp with peopel equaly minded. A t1 frigates, when sided with a t1 cruiser, becomes five fold more dangerous.