Ships & Modules

Tanked destroyer with warp stabs. Enough stab to warp under the non-infinipoint tacklers at lowsec gates, enough tank to survive the first few smartbombs. Ignore web, they instawarp you.

Magnate. Run with 1-2 Meta4 istab + 1-2 Meta4 nanofiber for a sub 2-3 secs align. Fit cargo rigs.
General rule of thumb, anything below 2secs align are very difficult or almost impossible to catch (remember EVE works on a 1 Hz ticks).

Don't bother running cruiser hulls for distribution missions unless it's a blockade runner.
They attract too much attention, is slower (warp speed plays a significant factor) and more expensive to lose.

The only thing you need to watch out for in a frigate are smartbombs.
Nobody does it (read very rare) outside of the well-known pipes/focus areas like the infamous Rancer or similar other places.

A nice Gallente Option for Cargo runs in Low is the Exequror. Upt to 900 km3 without Rigs/Mods and enough Space for Nanos, Stabs and whatnot

Training for a cloaking device is trivial and you have no excuse not to do so. Requires only Electronics IV, and a 3.5M skillbook. Train Cloaking III so you can use an Improved Cloaking Device, then you can do the MWD+cloak trick.


Then you can use this type of fit and have the best of both worlds:

[Magnate, losec gatecrasher]

Expanded Cargohold I
Expanded Cargohold I
Warp Core Stabilizer I

1MN MicroWarpdrive I

Improved Cloaking Device II
[Empty High slot]

Small Low Friction Nozzle Joints I
Small Low Friction Nozzle Joints I
Small Low Friction Nozzle Joints I

Admittedly the Improved Cloaking Device is a bit spendy for a very new character: it costs more than a fully fitted Omen.

With 0 skills this has a 442m3 cargohold and align time of 4.5 seconds (with MWD off). With better skills and meta cargoholds, you can probably ditch one of the cargoholds for inertia stabilizers or a second warp stab if you're really paranoid about getting caught in a scram camp.

You then have two options when faced with a gatecamp:
(1) MWD+cloak trick
(2) no MWD plus align and warp

It doesn't get much safer than that. There's always the possibility of landing out of gate on top of someone with an instalock and scrambler, and there's really no defense against that.

Evasive maneuvering and spaceship command help with agillity.

A frig can cloak+mwd with just the prototype cloak. You might to train some mwd skills though to get your speed up. A couple of levels in all nav skills help you greatly. The gold standard is nav itself to V, the rest to IV. Everything on top of that is gravy. Don't focus on that for now but do buy, plug in and train all of the nav skills to 2 just to get you started.

Moving in low like a pro requires an extensive skillset. There are many tools in the game like local, the star map, bookmarks, the directional scanner that you'll need to learn to use. For now, I'ld suggest you visit dotlan (a map site) and learn to use some filters in the ingame starmap (like 'pilots in space', 'ships recently destroyed' and 'pods recently destroyed', these are not exact names) and to make an insta bookmark for every station you visit. If you undock, power up your mwd and fly at least 200k straight ahead, preferably much more. Bookmark that spot in space. Next time you undock, you can warp to that spot and your ship will go to warp almost instantly, hence the name 'insta'.

Having instas on your station and an idea how crowded the systems are will help you stay safe in low sec most of the time.

One more thing, there is some psychology involved. A pirate that sees an industrial will almost certainly want to see what is inside. An experienced pvper that sees a young character in a big ship for its age (and your cruiser is that) will know that you're an easy target. But when they see a T1 frigate, they'll be a lot less interested.