EVE New Citizens Q&A

You didn't ask this but just to be complete I will point out to all the new players that you can be equally, or even more vulnerable on a station as on a gate. Make sure you have proper insta-dock and insta-undock bookmarks for all the stations you regularly visit in a Blockade Runner.

my blockade runners are mostly fit for align time and warp speed. If I want capacity a Deep Space Transport is rather useful. MWD+cloak works, plus they can fit for a ton of ehp, not to mention that super overload bonus. I mostly fly in high and some low sec.

OP, your best bet to learn how not to get ganked is to experiment with ganking yourself.

Learn what makes us say "ah, F it, we'll go for the other target instead".

This is effective in high and low.
Running a BR active there is not much you can do wrong. You won't get caught in 95% of all cases using the cloak. That said you should always passive shield fit you BR for tank and as long as you don't haul maximum cargo for align.
All BRs have more or less the same maximum cargo (~13k m^3), the same EHP passive tank (~21k-23k) and the same align time (< 4s). Exception is the Prorator due to the 4x lows you can have 2.9s align time but only 17k shield tank because it was meant to armor tank.
As example Viator, rigged for max warp speed:
ALL V
20.5k EHP
3.7s align



With 20k EHP and no resistance hole (~45%) you can survive at least 5 to 6 smartbombing BS (Rokhs with 3k volley) and easily 2x Tornado volley.

Within high and low sec you'll need to be very unlucky or very bad at the game to get caught in a blockade runner.

They are most vulnerable when undocking, so try to put station instajumps in place.

oh and use nano's instead of inertia stabilisers, and shield resistance amplifiers /shield boosters instead of shield extenders. (for the occasional smart bomb)

keeping your signature as low as possible, keeps you from getting locked

I came here to say this. Fit enough tank to take at least one volley from a nado of any ammo type. If someone has to bring out more than one battlecruiser to gank you that lowers your risk significantly. There is no excuse for leaving slots empty, even on a hauler.

I've seen too many blockade runner killmails with a cloak and no tank mods, or just active and resist mods with no buffer, which is useless against an instanado.

My trusty nereus even has 32k+ EHP. That's almost equivalent to a buffer tanked cruiser and enough to discourage attempts by the bored ganker hanging out on a gate in his nado.

Medium shield extenders, adaptive invulns, 2x extender rigs and an EM rig. You can still be ganked but there's no excuse for being one-shotted.

Resistance amplifier alone are not enough, you need buffer tank. Example : 3x Rohks with smarties dish out ~9k damage instantly, if you don't have the buffer tank you are dead that simple.

About locking times:
Eve works with 1s ticks, so in prinziple 3.9s = 3.0s as far as align time matters. The next thing that matters is your ping, living in Europe you should be fine contrary to Australia or anything Pacific.
So if you can get below x.9 with inertia stabs do it, if not use nanos.

I took my new shiney blockade runner out and the second day out it got popped leaving the station. I made an instant warp for jita but not dodixie... my bad. Lost about 500 mil in cargo and ship. Though being the revenge seeking type I stalked the guy that killed me and stole the loot on two of his kills so I am back to even on the deal.

Lesson learned though. When I am in jita I harass the station gankers. I was there for nearly two days and they only got one ship. I have them all on my contacts list, the poppers and their alt looters. Mostly I sit afk but they are mostly too scared to pop someone and lose the load.

My biggest beef is, I was tracking the guy that popped me to loot his kills and I saw every time he popped someone he would lose security status (-1.5), then he disappeared for a half hour and came back with a positive security status (0.4).... Is it that easy to manipulate security status so you can go on endlessly popping ships leaving stations in high sec?

Anyway I have come to understand the mechanics the hard way, but I got off easy as I recovered my losses. Though I will be much tougher to kill I understand that I still can be killed with bad luck.

Sometimes my cloak fails due to lag or I come through a gate too close to a ship to cloak after aligning. And sometimes my instadock spot even comes up way short or lags while trying to dock. Harder to kill yes, impossible no.

As for the ship defenses I don't use them, I pack on cargo space to make my hauling more efficient. If I packed on defenses I might as well go back to a regular freighter with more cargo capacity.

In 0.0 space you can use the free-floating directional camera in conjunction with the f11 system map to plot an unexpected angle of approach to a gate. Maybe I've just been lucky, but I've avoided a lot of bubbles that way. Will be an extra warp (or sometimes two) to position yourself. Blockade Runner high slot maybe consider fitting a probe launcher. If you get really trapped in a system perhaps you can scan down a wormhole and get out through that.

Intresting,

Though 3x Rokhs with smarties, how often does that happen in High sec?
is that a real threat in peace time?
that is a lot of isk, on a bare gamble that the blockade runner has any loot to drop in the first place.

I've my blockade runners fitted with low sec in mind and from my experiences there, when you're locked you're dead anyway, I have had quite some success with a super low sig, yes there are disco gate campers now and then a few of them don't get through my resistances if there are lots op people in the system you should proceed more careful than directly warp on a gate anyway.