EVE New Citizens Q&A

I hear talk about good combat ships, good mining ships, etc. and I know some ships are built for specific reasons, but what I don't hear a lot about is research ships. Is there a ship specifically built for research / exploration? Or do you just pick one and throw some gear on it?

I've been interested in exploring a little. I found some "angels" in negative space who blew me up, and I found some drones that sat there and growled and hissed at me (which was just freaky), but am interested in playing around out there and finding sone WHs and things other than just bad guys and growling drones.


Thanks

From EVElopedia:

Frigates
The following T1 frigates give a 5% bonus to scan strength per racial frigate skill level, they are cheap and great for beginners to try out scanning.

Amarr - Magnate
Caldari - Heron
Gallente - Imicus
Minmatar - Probe

T2
Covert Ops
Covert ops frigates give a 10% bonus to scan strength per level in Covert Ops skill. Additionally, it allows one to fit a Covert Ops Cloaking Device II that greatly increase the safety of traveling between systems in dangerous space. It should be noted that covert ops frigates provides less bonus to scan strength than its T1 counterpart until you train the Covert Ops skill to level III, because the racial frigate V required for covert ops frigates already provides 25% bonus to the scanning specialized T1 frigate.

Amarr - Anathema
Caldari - Buzzard
Gallente - Helios
Minmatar - Cheetah

Strategic Cruisers (Tech 3s, or T3s) are the viable option for exploration, but bear in mind that they are VERY expensive and exploration can be done in far cheaper ships like a battlecruiser. A T3 may be optimal but remember the golden rule of EVE: "Never fly what you can't afford to lose."

TL;DR
Don't save up for ages for a Strategic Cruiser unless you can afford to lose it, because it will happen - eventually.

T3 cruisers are designed for two things:

1- Let newer players get hold of powerful ships without too much training.

2- Provide an all-in-one exploration platform, especially for w-space.

The balance against the short train time and low dependence on maxed skills in everything (you can get one pretty much as good as it's getting in the course of a few months, that's pretty ridiculous for anything bigger than a frigate normally) is that it's made with materials and plans that can only be harvested in w-space and requires a lot of research and intermediate steps.

Long story short, your most basic T3 ship on a good day you're talking 300-500 million isk. The builds that most people would reccommend given you're already sinking that much into a cruiser (and that you lose SP if it blows up) are usually going to top 1 billion. My Legion ran about... 1.2b, if i'm remembering correctly.

Though, the good news there is that that's not as much money as it seems like if you're doing w-space sites. A few hours of running C1 combat sites for nanoribbons can net you 100M-200M if you get decently lucky with the salvager.

All this is sort of an end-goal for solo exploration, though, when you're talking "new" as in "first couple months" even with a fairly focused character you're going to want to start by skilling up into a Battlecruiser that doesn't rely on drones (when you get to w-space exploration drones are useless if you're solo, though they regain some of their power when you're in a group of 2-3 because the sleepers won't one-hit kill them as often). Make sure you grab the necessary secondary skills -- astrometrics/astrometric support skills, salvaging, hacking, analysis, and some of your science skills for research. Focus on high-sec and low-sec RADAR sites initially for materials and find a place with research slots so you can use them.

(Disclaimer: I don't really do research beyond improving BPOs to replace **** in 0.0, so mostly I sell raw materials instead. I hate the mini-neopets thing that is station maintenance to the point I don't even do planetary interaction anymore. It's my leisure time, dammit, I'mma use it to explore strange new worlds, meet new life and civilizations, and shoot them up the arse with an antimatter shell.)

Two separate terminologies. T3 is the highest ship designation. Strategic Cruisers. They can be fit for different applications, exploration among them. And yes, well fit they run over a billion.

Back to original topic, use a T1 and see if you like it.

Oh good, my arch. Is at lvl4 currently, so that is a plus at least. One less I have to worry about.

My char. Cannot even tie his shoes without a skill, is there ever an end to training :D

For exploration you have T2 cov ops (not the bombers) and you can had the sisters probe launcher that also give you some extra bonus to scanning


Edit: AND sister probes

Lots of bubbles in exploration?

I have never seen a bub in a null plex/site. Guess I am lucky.

1/10