EVE New Citizens Q&A

would anyone turn Lek away from Mauraders?

A couple tips:
First off, you don't need to fit all of that at once. A tractor really isn't needed at all and it's not essential to have both Codebreaker and Analyzer, you can do just fine with fitting one or the other and dock up to switch them.

It'll also depend a lot on where you want to explore; in highsec you can do fine with a cruiser or AF (or even a T1 frig for some sites), but lowsec and nullsec will require more powerful ships or friends.

And the ultimate ship you want to work towards is a T3 cruiser, they can be fit to do all-in-one exploration fairly easily.

For something to start out with, I would suggest either a T1 frig or cruiser (which one depends on your race and skills). I also suggest joining the Exploration channel in-game, there are many experienced explorers on there who are typically willing to answer any questions you would have (as long as it's not just "Do it all for me because I'm too lazy to think" type stuff).

And I definitely wouldn't suggest using a Marauder; they are too big to fit in most highsec sites and too slow to use in low/nullsec.

Edit: As the previous poster said, drone boats make the best all-in-one ships (outside of T3s). And the Gila's also on the list (less training time than an Ishtar or Pilgrim, but it has similar tank/gank to an Ishtar).

so the trick to it, before I can afford one of the big ships is to do the probe thing and find what type of exploration site it is, mark the site so I can go back to it, dock and equip the stuff I need then go back....so dock and equip either the codebreaker or analyzer before actually entering the site.

or can I kill everythiing then leave, dock and equip, and go back in?

I know it sounds like I am rushing it, but I just want to know how much exploring I can do at what level...I mean with the thrasher, I could equip 5 guns, the probe launcher, tractor and salvager fine, its the two medium slots that are a concern until I can get a proper ship like you all suggested...but if I can leave and come back then it's not a huge deal as I could get rid of the npc's while having a cap recharger and afterburner, leave and switch them out for codebreaker or analyzer and go back in to finish the area out.

and nobody really mentioned the above possibility so I don't know if that works or not...maybe once I kill the npc ships and leave I can't go back?

otherwise it seems doable with my future destroyer, possibly even a frigate like the rifter (I am minmatar) if I can leave and go back I can easily switch out my guns for salvager

I guess I will basically just have to try it out to see what can be done and what can't

I look at the Noctis and think it would be awesome with more power than the thrasher as well as a huge cargohold, wouldn't need a cap recharger for that ship

anyway, thanks for all the suggestions and help

No. The site will despawn if you leave it.

The only thing that remain is wrecks.

Sorry bout that, I didn't realize I hadn't changed my picture. I am Minmatar and so the Thrasher is a racial ship. I played a few years ago for about 3 weeks I think before I was called away out of the country for 8 months. When I returned I had other things to worry about and just never got back into the game. Now I am back at home and looking for a game and so came back to EVE. I apologize for any confusion I caused.

So no tractor, it's an unnecessary item when I can just fly to wrecks as easy.

Gravitometric and radar sites I can go in as full combat fittings then leave to change to exploration settings to loot.

I am not interested in the ladar and gravimetric sites so they are not my concern.

Only other sites would be wormholes, which I would probably avoid in just a destroyer, and anomalies....anomalies being the only ones I would have to go into as combat and explorer but if I remove the tractor I would have no exploration fittings in mid slots and now only 2 high slots taken up by exploration fittings, that being launcher and salvager.

So it is quite possible for me to do this in a destroyer as long as I am careful and don't end up in a wormhole. And in fact I could train up the necessary skills to do the ladar and gravimetric as well.

I don't have my destroyer yet, should get it today or tomorrow I would think. Need to get the skills....as I mentioned at the beginning this is a pre-profession thread, just me wanting to know the likelihood of it all working out for me....and it appears that it could work our pretty well with just a destroyer until I can get bigger ships.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this discussion and helping me figure things out, I really appreciate everyone's comments and especially that nobody flamed me or made me fool stupid despite the question being kind of noobish (I think?). I received so much information here, info on how to load my ship, info on different sites and how they react (disappear only when containers are cleared), not needing a tractor, great discussion on ship types, even a chat channel to join. Just all round a really good discussion that made me think and showed me quite a few things.

Here, this should be a fairly easy to fly Thrasher fit for exploration. It's not amazing, but it'll get you started. Upgrade the modules on it to T2 as you have the skills to (and the specific modules I listed are a very good balance of price/performance (though I'm less sure on the prices of the Autocannons (ACs), you might need to trade down to 200mm Gallium ones if the price is too much), so I would suggest using them specifically 'till you can use T2 ones). If you prefer to keep more range, you can switch out the 200mm ACs for a set of 250mm artillery (arty), but you might need to trade the Gyrostabilizer (Gyro) for a Micro Auxiliary Power Core (MAPC) if your fitting skills are poor.

Keep an Analyzer in your cargohold and you can dock up and switch the Codebreaker for that when you find Mag sites (trying to fit both at once halves your tank and cuts your EHP [1] by 1/3). And the Gravitational Capacitor rig is there to help out a bit with probing, since I'm guessing your skills are less than optimal, that and the Sisters probes (only about 2M for a full set of 8, well worth it) will help a lot in locking down sigs.

And the fitting is mostly designed for taking on Angel rats, which are the rats that spawn in Minmatar space (I'm assuming you're there since that's where you would have started with a Minmatar character), if you're somewhere else the Explosive resist rig and the ammo would need to be changed to better suit the local rats (for Minmatar, Explosive resists and Fusion ammo are best).

[Thrasher, LowSP Explorer]
Damage Control I
Gyrostabilizer I

Experimental 1MN Afterburner I
Medium Azeotropic Ward Salubrity I
Codebreaker I

200mm Light Prototype Automatic Cannon, Fusion S
200mm Light Prototype Automatic Cannon, Fusion S
200mm Light Prototype Automatic Cannon, Fusion S
200mm Light Prototype Automatic Cannon, Fusion S
200mm Light Prototype Automatic Cannon, Fusion S
200mm Light Prototype Automatic Cannon, Fusion S
Core Probe Launcher I, Sisters Core Scanner Probe I
Salvager I

Small Gravity Capacitor Upgrade I
Small Core Defence Field Extender I
Small Anti-Explosive Screen Reinforcer I

And, as I said before, ask questions in the Exploration channel if something's confusing. All of us have been newbie explorers back in the day

Edited to add in common abbreviations for some stuff.

[1] EHP, or Effective Hit Points, is the total hitpoints of your ship with your resists against the expected damage types factored in. Specifically, in this case, against the damage types that the Angel rats do. Each type of NPC has its own damage profile and you want to match your resists to it if you can to maximize your tank. For PvE fits, you generally look at the damage profile of the rats your fighting, and for PvP/Wormholes/Incursions you use an 'omni tank', meaning that you tank for all resists about equally. Tank is computed the same way as EHP except that it uses the base regen/boost/repair per second of your tank rather than looking at the hit points.

Here is a full list of NPC damage profiles. It's designed to work with EFT, you simply paste it into the end of the config.ini file for EFT, the de-facto fitting tool for Eve (though there is also PyFa and EveHQ for the people who dislike EFT's interface):
DamageProfile=Angel,480,0,719,3058
DamageProfile=Blood raider,613,570,60,0
DamageProfile=Gurista,0,570,3504,0
DamageProfile=Sansha,1945,1598,0,0
DamageProfile=Serpentis,0,1627,1320,0
DamageProfile=Amarr empire,1204,1349,0,0
DamageProfile=Caldari state,0,795,944,0
DamageProfile=Gallente federation,25,781,1127,0
DamageProfile=Minmatar republic,615,310,815,1633
DamageProfile=EoM,0,618,1718,0
DamageProfile=Mercenaries,90,634,424,108
DamageProfile=Rogue Drones,86,91,281,964
DamageProfile=EM,1,0,0,0
DamageProfile=Exp,0,0,0,1
DamageProfile=Kin,0,0,1,0
DamageProfile=Therm,0,1,0,0

Those are all very good questions.

The reason for no cap recharge mod is that there is very little on that fit that actually uses cap. The only things are the AB, codebreaker, and salvager (and Damage Control (DC) technically, but it uses like 1 cap per 30s and doesn't really count towards cap drain); and the AB is the only thing to be run for long periods at a time. The natural cap regeneration will be more than enough to run that AB forever.

There's no capacitor rig, the Grav Cap rig improves probe strength, not your ship's capacitor (since your ship's capacitor doesn't really need help). The Ward Stabularity is a named Medium Shield Extender. It increases your shield capacity (and, since it doesn't increase your shield regen time, it increases your regen/second too). This greatly improves your shield HP and regen per second and is providing most of the tank for this fit. This should be sufficient for most sites you could run in a Thrasher anyways (mostly just know that you can't run the Watch, Vigil, or 4/10 combat sites and the 3/10 might be iffy).

The Light Prototype ACs are, again, named modules. The reason I listed ACs instead of arty is that ACs do more DPS, but at the cost of range. ACs or arty will both work fine (which is why I suggested that 250mm Arty would work well too, though it might require a MAPC).

The difference between them is that ACs do much more DPS, but have much smaller range. All the weapons in Eve will have one subtype that is short range/high DPS (ACs, blasters, pulse lasers, rockets/HAMs/Torps) and one that is longer range but with less DPS (Arty, railguns, beam lasers, standard/HML/Cruise) for the different racial weapons (Projectile, Hybrids, Lasers, Missiles). The choice between short range/high DPS and long range/Lower DPS depends a lot on your personal playstyle. Whichever one you use, you should try and make sure you're keeping the targets at the right range for your weapons (short-range stuff can't hit too far, and long range has issues hitting stuff that's too close).

And the reason for Fusion over EMP is that Angel rats are weak to Explosive damage, it does more damage to them due to their resists. Fusion ammunition does mostly Explosive damage (while EMP does mostly EM), making Fusion the ammo of choice for fighting Angels. If you were fighting Sansha or Blood Raider ships, whose weakness is EM, then EMP would be the ammo to use. (And Guristas and Serpentis are weak to the Kinetic and Thermal damage that Phased Plasma does).

And one other thing that it seems like you might not have run into yet. Named/meta modules. I'll give you a basic overview of them, since it can be very confusing at first.

First off, Meta level. Every item in the game has a meta level which you can view with show info. T1 items are Meta0, T2 is Meta5, and faction/DED/Officer items are Meta6+. What you should be concerned with right now, however, is "named" items, which are Meta1-4. As a general trend, the higher the meta level, the more powerful the item is. So a Meta3 gun is better than a Meta0 (T1) gun. Named modules are nice because they have the same fitting requirements as T1 stuff, but they perform better. However, higher meta level modules (especially meta4) can be much more expensive too, due to their low skill requirements and high effectiveness. Typically the different meta levels of a class of item will share a naming scheme (like how all meta4 projectile weapons will have the 'Scout' keyword in them).

That is why I suggested the Azeotropic Medium Shield Extender (MSE), because that's a Meta3 MSE, which will perform better than a T1 one, but doesn't cost as much as Meta4. Similarly with the Prototype ACs, they're Meta3 200mm ACs (and Gallium are Meta2 projectile weapons, which will be even cheaper, but slightly worse). The reason I didn't suggest a named Damage Control is that almost all the named ones are quite expensive (especially when the T2 ones are cheaper) and the reason I didn't suggest a named Gyro is that it's been so long since I've used anything but T2 Gyro that I can't remember how bad the markup is, so I went with the cheap T1 one.

As I said before, those were all excellent questions. Eve has a steep learning curve and the only way to learn is to ask intelligent questions.

Yeah, the exact syntax of the EFT damage profiles is the EM,Therm,Kin,Exp damage for EFT to assume will be coming in. So, Angels will do roughly 11 EM, 17 Kin, and 72 Exp damage (percent, but the forums dislike the symbol). Meaning that you need to mostly worry about Exp damage, but keep in mind that there's a bit of EM and Kin coming at you too.

And it sounds like you have the right idea about long/short ranged weapons. Long range can be good if you can dictate the range, but short range is nice when they'll be right on top of you and you can't control the range.

And, there is very little good information on meta levels out there, because it's tough to explain in words to a newbie and it's a "well, duh" thing to anyone who understands it. So it's hard to write it in a way that will benefit the people who actually need the information (and that's before you run into the issue of newbies not even knowing the info needs to be learned).

And for the different races, I don't know of a solid guide for them or their locations, but their main weaknesses are Angels:Explosive, Blood Raiders:EM, Guristas:Kinetic, Sansha:EM, and Serpentis:Thermal. And they will live in the territories of the empire that they go with (Amarr:Blood Raiders; Sansha, Caldari:Guristas, Gallente:Serpentis, Minmatar:Angels). The easiest way to get a rough guess about what faction is where is that if you look at the map in 'flattened' mode, 'north' is Caldari space, east is Minmatar, south is Amarr, and west is Gallente (roughly). For a more specific listing of what rats are in a system, you can look up the system on Dotlan and look for the "Local Pirates" in that system. Also, the race of the rats is per-region, so all the systems in Heimatar (for instance) will have the same type of rats.

And, yes, knowing what to search for is half the battle. There's not a ton you can do about that other than just keep doing the best you can though.

Most of the time I prefer to use Ombey's 2D EVE Maps (PDF).

DOTLAN is best for statistics, and has a handy jump range / planner for capital and Black Ops pilots.

Just to clarify, site will not despawn if you kill rats and leave. But if you start to hack/salvage/use that arch module and then leave, it will.

On top of that lots of sites spawn waves of rats AFTER using exploration modules. So it is impossible to separate hacking etc. from fighting rats and it is done on the purpose.

So there are two ways to explore, both with their own drawbacks. Probe in specialised ship, then come back in another ship, suited for that particular site. That way ads time for travel, refitting etc. Or try to pack everything on one ship and suffer from a performance loss. Your choice (and to have to make a choice is good).