I am surprised that no one gave what I consider to be the wisest and most on-point bit of advice when it comes to autopiloting:
“Do not autopilot until you know when it is okay to do so.”
In general, it is not a good idea to autopilot… especially if you have something valuable in the cargohold, are flying something shiny, or moving around a lot of stuff in one ship.
And never autopilot outside of high-sec.
That said… there are times where it is convenient. Such as moving your current clone to the other side of the map (for jump cloning), moving an alt-character to a different trade hub, etc.
(see also: getting from point A to point B and the stakes are low enough that “dying” is simply an inconvenience).
luckily all SOE missions are in high sec and I am quite careful. but I am already scared when I travel into 0.5 and 0.6 space. in 0.5 space see many ships with suspect status flying around the Stargate. I guess they are the gankers.
Don’t be too worried about 0.5 and 0.6 space - CONCORD still respond, just a little slower. This is only a concern for more heavily defended targets. In 1.0 CONCORD arrive and pop the offender before they burn through your armour. In 0.5 the slower response means the attacker can get a few more volleys in - and that may finish you off.
Destroyers are so thinly armoured that any ganker is going to kill you before any CONCORD response anywhere.
The best defence is situational awareness.
Set standings on known Gankers to red so you see them highlighted. If you see a sudden increase in numbers in local, wonder why - it’s an organised group that’s appeared. If you see lots of similar names, wonder why. If you see lots of destroyers on D-Scan (notoriously Catalysts) then wonder why they are there. Don’t hang around on the undock of a station (wait in station), don’t look like you are not paying attention.
Just be aware of what is happening around you and you’ll be safer than most.
If you loose a gifted ship learning something, then that’s fine: an expensive lesson, but something of value to you. Just throwing it away doing something really lazy and silly would be disappointing.
zkillboard is a website that scrapes together most of the ship kill information from Eve. It’s a really useful site for intelligence about players - do they hunt? what sort of ship do they fly? what targets do they pick? and so forth.
A good trick is to set the standings on the corporations that have members frequently “CONCORDed” - a good example is the “CODE.” alliance and their members. You are looking for CONCORD killing players in typical Ganking ships - Catalysts such as this where it’s a really cheap fit, focused on maximising damage, reducing target lock time and preventing their escape. Also, he’s not got ammunition in his hold (he’s not going to reload - he’ll be slag by then).
It’s useful also to look at where people are being attacked (the list of CONCORDed players will give that) - since thats where they are hunting. For example, systems around Jita, where there are going to be nice fat haulers and so forth, are a good example.