EVE New Citizens Q&A

What would you guys recommend?

I was thinking a frigate, but if more expensive stuff is better, it would give me something to aim for.

Long-range guns, and I want it to be fast without warp. I want to follow some missions for a while before I get into PVP. I don't care much about cargo hold just yet.

It's still really unclear what you want to do with this ship, and you need to elaborate more.

How "long range" is long enough?

Garmur has the longest range (AFAIK) weapons of any of the frigates in the game. It's also one of the fastest.
Any of the Stealth Bombers with Jav torps would be another option, but they're slow.

But neither of these two ships are recommended for missions, except for maybe doing FW missions in a Bomber.

Typically, the "long range" frigates project out to about 20km or so, with a few going further, such as the Slicer.

Again, most of these ships are incapable of anything but the easiest missions.

I suggest you re-evaluate the practicality of your request, and/or give us some better information to work with.

I assume you want to kite on grid out of tackle range with possibly a Minmatar ship? How do you like the Breacher?

I recommend Minmatar to start because likely you are running those missions in Minmatar empire space being Minmatar, you will do better with such a ship due to resistance differences against local rats. Higher SP it may matter less as you can patch the resistance hole more easily. Fun ship to fly, give you time to raise core skills.
Yeah, you should train at least one good T1 frig since you are talking pvp. Later you can easily buy fit stacks of them for practice.

For something fast and inexpensive with long range that you can reasonably skill into within a month I would look at the Bellicose. Range using heavy missiles is around 40Km with level 3 skills and you can easily get similar range with drones. Speed is around 625m/s with afterburner - should be easy to get cap stable. MWD boost that to 1600m/s but will require careful cap management. You should be able to achieve around 160 dps with 25K ehp. My market ALTS use these to fly the SOE Epic arc to build faction standing and these characters do not have a lot of combat SP.

What Tsukino says here is pretty much what I wanted to say only worded better than what I was going to post.

I see a lot of new players that come in here and ask questions similar to this and they are all misguided. I don't want to tell you how to play your game but I know enough about this game to know that if I answered the question the way that you asked it I'd not be helping you out at all.

Like others have said a ship is a disposable tool to get a job done. A tool that fits not only the job at hand but your particular play style. If you don't know what you want to do or how you would like to do it that's fine as a matter of fact that's great because you get to play around with all different kinds of stuff to figure that out.

The best thing that I can recommend to you is to try out different things and different ship. Having options open to you is usually better than focusing on one ship. I would say skill up all four races frigate skill to 3 and get the associated weapon skills up to about the same. Then go out and do some missions or maybe some ratting to get a feel for fitting and combat basics. Then maybe try ratting in low sec or just go into low sec looking for a fight. Eventually you'll figure out what you want to do and how you want to do it.

The above being said tech 3 destroyers have different modes so while you can not be both fast and long range at the same time you can switch between speed mode and sniper mode pretty quickly so that might be a medium term goal for you to set. However I want to stress how bad of an idea that I think setting a specific ship as a goal is. You should be focusing on getting well rounded.

MJD on a HAC?

200% bonus on top of base speed, so 5625m/s (light missile speed with max skills and no bonus) + 11,250m/s (200% of 5,625) = 16,875m/s

turns out to be a decent range bonus as well. Similar to the range bonus on the kestrel for example.

I think OP is looking for Svipul.

I'm going to ignore the pve section of your post, as speed really isn't a factor when doing missions except to pick up loot.

Pvp what you are looking for is either a nano kiting or sniping ship. These exist at almost every sub-capital size category. Nano kiting ships rely primarily on their own speed to dictate range, often fighting near the edge of or outside of warp disruptor range, and zooming back in to land a point when the opponent attempts to disengage. I'll list some ship options below. For learning, the general rule is to pick a ship, fit up 10 of them, and go out and lose them. Once you've done this two or three times you might even get a kill! The tristan is an excellent ship for learning to kite, though spending some time in a slicer will help you learn to manage transversal.

T1 Frigates:
Tristan
Light Missile Condor.

Faction Frigates (navy and pirate):
Hookbill,
Slicer (either pulse or beam),
Artillery Firetail (usually a scram kiter, but can change ammo for longer range),
Light Missile Garmur

T1 Destroyer, in general these are much slower than frigates with a ton more firepower.:
Light Missile Corax
Light Missile Talwar
Artillery Thrasher
Algos

T3 Destroyers:
All depending on fit

T1 Cruisers - Slower than frigates, faster than destroyers, better firepower and tank, worse damage application.
Autocannon Stabber - The falloff bonus means this ship projects to a significant range
Beam Omen - Bad tracking
Rapid Light Missile Caracal

Navy Faction Cruisers:
Omen Navy Issue - Even with pulse lasers, this ship pushes damage to 40km, and can out run some frigates.
Rapid Light Missile Scythe Fleet Issue - Faster Caracal
Artillery Stabber Fleet Issue - This ship loses the falloff bonus that the stabber has in favor or a tracking bonus. Autocannons won't project damage ass far, but the tracking bonus means that artillery will apply damage better.
Vexor Navy Issue - Slower than most of the other options here, oversize afterburner fits can often escape from brawling situations and move out to kite range after killing off tackle.

Pirate faction cruisers:
Autocannon Cynabal - Basically a better stabber. It pilots like a giant frigate with 40km falloff.
Rapid Light Missile Orthus - The true king of kite ships, it kills anything that can catch it, and outruns from anything that can kill it.

Attack Battlecruisers:
Autocannon Tornado
Pulse Oracle

I've completely skipped the t2 lineup for kiters, mainly because they're flown more as doctrine ships and are usually slower and tankier. There are still some excellent T2 kiters. The vagabond comes to mind as a super tanky cynabal. As for sniping ships, they rely less on range and more on high alpha combined with super long ranges to kill their targets. These are most effective in groups, and their overall speed is lower.
Frigates:
Rail Harpy

Destroyers:
Rail Comorant
Arty Thrasher
Arty Svipul
Beam Confessor

Cruisers:
Eagle

Attack Battlecruisers
Rail Naga
Arty Tornado
Beam Oracle