For as long as I have been dabbling in EVE (7ish years) one of the largest pain points for me has always been fitting ships.
It takes forever to look up a viable ship fitting, and look up each module one by one, buy them, and load up the ship. If you are doing something like RVB or PVP in general and lose ship after ship, it can be especially punishing to then have to go and repeat this build process.
Is there some mechanic built in to EVE that I do not know about that lets you save fittings and buy / fit them on a ship in one click? Or maybe ships that are prebuilt but available on the market (not contracts)?
Now that you can buy more than one thing at the same time, you can just “buy all” from a saved fitting, or “fit to active ship” from fittings view. You can also import/export fits from zkillboard into EFT/Pyfa and the other way around.
Makes fitting fleets very handy.
Absolutely. The fitting tool will let you save your fits and the save menu has a buy all button so you can purchase the entire fit with 1 click in a trade hub. You can also import fits from external tools like PYFA.
Most corporations will have recommended or doctrine fits preconfigured for their members - also accessible using the fitting tool or a web site like http://fleet-up.com/Home/Index
You will usually find alliance doctrine ships available on private contract to alliance members.
Edit: you can also share your fits - simply drag them into chat or copy to clipboard if you want to share them on the forums.
Sounds like you had not discovered the useful magic of saved personal / corp fits.
Also, anytime you are killed the kill report you get in-game has your fit in it.
You can easily reproduce a fit you have saved whether it is your own or from a link someone else put in chat or other methods such as importing fits from third-party fitting tools.
Now EvE has the ability to “simulate” fit in-game and you can play around with that and save those fits as well.
So using saved fits shown (on left side) when you open show current ship, you can make any empty ship you have active and fit it with any fit you have saved with one click (you have to have the modules to be used in your hangar).
Using this you can quickly change fits on a mission ship, or make 5, 10, 100 of the same pvp ship to go lose then jump right into another of the same ship with the same fit to go fight more with no delay.