Ok, I got your attention. New player, only an Alpha, have finished doing the level 1 missions. Reached the point, I want to just jump down a few wormholes, see what’s there and have some fun. From a practical point of view, I am never going to win a fight PvP or PvE (from what I read) no matter where the wormhole takes me. As such, my thought is to not even bother installing any offensive weaponry on my ship, only add something that helps me run away. Does my logic make sense?
Secondary question since it just happened: I took out an insured ship, went down a wormhole, got killed. Once I got home, I got the insurance money and purchased the same ship. Then Aura? advised me I had items I could claim. The items looked suspiciously like the items, which were mounted on the ship I just lost. Is that a game mechanic or something to do with insurance?
Weapons are rarely fit to scanning frigates. The scanning-bonused frigates have a small drone bay. While some use this for salvage drones, it might be better to store ECM drones. At least that way you have a small chance of escaping after being caught. Though…thinking of it, I’m not sure that Alphas can even use ECM drones.
The Redeem Items thing is a new thing, for newbie Alphas, I’m guessing.
Normally when your ship gets destroyed, it creates a wreck, and inside the wreck you have a 50% chance that each module and weapon installed on the ship, and also the cargo, will survive. People use the API system to access game data and keep track of kills/losses on killboards, and if you look at that you’ll see that about half the modules / cargo survives. Of course, to recover it, you must get in a new ship and go back to the area where you got killed, so you can access the wreck of the old ship.
For PVP, whichever player killed you will claim the loot in your wreck as spoils of war. For PVE, if you have a bookmark to the location (for example if it was at an asteroid belt or in a mission pocket where you still have the mission guidance bookmark), you can probably go back and be fast enough to get your stuff and exit before the NPC pirates lock you up again and shoot your new ship.
Keep in mind the rules of engagement for the space that you’re in. In high-sec space, you only need to survive until Concord police gets there. And there are no warp-disruption bubbles. So you just need a ship that has warp core stabilizers in the low slots, and is otherwise very fast to align at each gate, because that’s where you’ll likely be hunted. So you can use Nanofibers or Inertial Stabilizers in the low slots for fast alignment. Or, just use a very brick tank ship, dissuade them from even bothering, as they’re not going to kill you before Concord arrives. On the other hand, in null, there are no combat limitations, and it’s likely that gates will be covered in warp-disruption bubbles, so “escape” is more about using the directional scanner (d-scan) to detect traps BEFORE you go to the gate, and having “perch” bookmarks around the gate so you can arrive at a distance and from an angle that’s not going to get sucked down into the anti-warp bubble. So, more “avoidance” and less “escape”.
There are modules that make your ship more agile (nanofibers, inertial stabs), that give you some immunity to warp disruption (warp core stabs), and that help you get out of trouble faster (microwarpdrive, micro jump drive, afterburner in some cases - if all you need to do is get back to the gate or get outside the bubble), and that help you stay hidden (cloaking devices). All of these have pretty big drawbacks, in most cases you won’t be able to fight with them installed. There are (Omega) ships that have access to the better covert ops cloak, or to interdiction nullifiers (immunity to warp bubbles), or immunity to jamming, and if you’re a veteran with the skills trained to unlock these ships, you can fly them into the dangerous areas.
The last option is to neutralize whoever caught you. You have electronic warfare (jamming), particularly ECM (which cause the attacker to lose target lock on you, which turns off all his warp scramble modules on you), energy neutralizing (just drain his capacitor, no juice = no warp scramble on you, and probably no guns either), and / or just shooting him down (dead is dead).