EVE New Citizens Q&A

I'm certainly no expert, but the first thing that comes to mind would be a wormhole corp where you could be the guy that scans down all the signatures in your home wormhole, updating bookmarks and locations of wormhole entrances and exits so the rest of your corpmates don't have to do it every day... that would provide an otherwise tedious service to your corporation making you useful but not tying you down too much. One option, at least.

Yup, any fleet that moves without scouts is likely to be ambushed. Scouts will be ahead, to the sides, and behind the fleet, to report to the fleet commander if / how many / what ship types of enemies there are. I don't know if you've been part of a fleet that moved around, but the whole "gate is red / gate is green" system is because the FC is waiting for scouts to report what's on the other side and whether it's safe.

Covert ops also provide approach vectors to land on top of the enemy fleet. The FC has to warp the fleet into the perfect range for its weapons; sometimes that's at point blank range, sometimes that's at 20-60 km from the enemy. They have to have a cloaked scout positioned beyond the enemy fleet, so they can warp the fleet at 10-70 km from the scout and arrive perfectly positioned to kill.

For smaller fleets, you're also likely to be the enemy "finder" and "tackler". You use your probes to locate the enemy, warp to the location cloaked, and as soon as your fleet arrives, or sometimes even while it's in warp, uncloak and keep the enemy there with warp disruptors.

There's also the possibility of "all covert" fleets. Bomber fleet is one example. The cov-ops battleship has the capability to open a jump bridge to send a whole fleet of cov-ops ships to a covert cyno beacon, in enemy territory. So you can prepare a fleet of cov-ops frigates, cruisers, and battleships, and perhaps even cov-ops transports for resupply, and go operate behind enemy lines.

https://www.eve-scout.com/

Check out the Signal Cartel. I'm sure they could use more folks scanning down chains.

o7

Mastering the fine art of combat probing will make you a very valuable addition to most gangs and any FC involved in large scale fleet engagements will fall over themselves to have you along on their side.

Being able to use D-Scan to get a solid approximation of the enemies location, then dropping probes, making one Analyze pass and having a warp-in is possibly the closest thing to pure black magic in EVE. One absolute Probing Wizard I flew with a while back was so amazingly and blisteringly good, his corp would reimburse his mid-grade Virtue pod if he lost it in a fleet engagement.

A combat prober can get warpins on fleets, find links boats (not a problem after November update) and even, very occasionally, tackle something.

The training queue for Perfect Probing Skills is very long and arduous. I suggest Astrometrics V first, followed by CovOps V, then Rangefinding V, Acquisition V and finally Pinpointing V. You'll also want Cybernetics V in there somewhere and some decent Navigation skills (Evasive Maneuvering V for example). When my main maps back onto Int/Mem, he'll be spending the three months or so it takes. My probing alt already has most of it and the difference between the two, even if both in Buzzards, is quite amazing.

FYI: On my Buzzards (THE ship of choice, followed possibly by a Tengu or Proteus) I run 1x T2 Gravity Capacitor rig and 1x T2 Hyperspatial rig. Using one Gravity rig means less stacking penalties and the Hyperspatial will have you warping at an Interceptor-Like 10AU/s. The Slot 7 and 8 probing implants are very nifty, especially the Acquisition one. Don't discount the value of faster Analyze passes. I also usually pack a Scram for those rare hero tackles.

edit: Being able to blaze a Covert Cyno will also make you very valuable to Black Ops operations. Cyno Bombers (fit as much tank as possible, an expanded probe launcher, cov-ops cloak and cov cyno) can hold down a target long enough for the fleet to jump/bridge in. A T3 Cruiser is ultimately better at this particular job, although bombers can certainly get this job done.

One of my favourite things to do in EVE is to hunt down people deep behind enemy lines and then drop a handful of Black Ops battleships on them. Check out Martino Fabbro's excellent YouTube videos.

join a WH corp and do your scanning in a proteus or stratios. you get to scan down the chain, and serve as tackle for any targets you find along the way until the fleet can get there

It's almost like real life. Who'da thought.

There's tons of job opportunities out there. I once thought of starting a corporation who's sole job was to collected up to date data, think of it like help channel but for anoms, player usage of systems such as ice/ore, etc, so that a person would just pay a 5 million isk fee or so and get an immediate answer without scanning down WHs themselves, or having to watch systems with anom ore/ice belts to see if its worth trying to mine from there due to competition, etc.

Whenever looking for a way to make isk, ask yourself what would you rather pay someone else to do if you needed that job done. Then do that job for others.

Every corp or alliance I've joined over the years who had adopted the "scouting is for alts" silliness asked me what I could contribute. "I'm a covert ops scout" which invariably resulted in the "we have alts for that" reply which forced the "then you have no idea what I can do for you".

Being a GOOD scout, as in properly good, with Dscanning, probing, relaying intel, being an extra FC at times etc etc is a massive boon to any entity, and most don't even realise what they're missing out on. The ones I joined did learn that, very quickly.