Hi All … very new to EVE here (1w old almost) and am fitting a Probe for Exploration … fgot the fitting from another thread as is a step up from the basic expo fit I had before. The One question (and heavy price tag) in the fitting is the use of Sisters probes vs standard probes (363k x 16 vs 4k x 16) … do the Sisters probes really make so much of a difference? Particularly considering that I’m getting taken out at least once a day and having to go re-fit and buy again.
If you’re still in the ‘getting blown up’ stages I’d suggest sticking with std probes for now. This fits with ‘don’t fly what you can’t afford to lose’.
But having said that, I think they’re worth the extra cost, due to the bonus to probe strength they provide, which makes scanning of things easier and faster (the less time you’ve got probes out the less chance someone sees them and works out what you’re up to). Once you reach a stage where ~500k on probes is no big deal for sure include them in your arsenal.
Regards,
Cypr3ss.
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Thanks Cypr3ss … definitely am in the getting blown up stage … and normally is when I am hacking … not searching … so will save the ISK for now.
There’s a few things you can do to ease the “dying” problems - how effective they are varies, a skilled and patient hunter is always going to have a very good chance of a kill. The idea is to make it a little less easy for the hunter.
The hunter has learnt to hunt.
The prey learns to survive.
So, if you see someone new in local, worry about them. Assume they are hostile unless you have good cause not to believe it. If you are in a Wormhole remember there is no Local.
D-scan is your friend. Lovingly caress and jab that button frequently. If something appears you don’t like, then worry.
Remember that D-scan is a fallible friend - clocked ships and some Recon ships don’t appear on it. Worrying about what D-scan isn’t showing is good.
Don’t get so engrossed in the hack that you loose situational awareness.
Don’t sit still. Orbit the site you are hacking. Hitting a moving target is less reliable and you may cause a cloaked attacker to uncloak if they are having to reposition.
A cloak drops as soon as any object is within 2,500m of the cloaked ship. So, drop someone valueless (you know that awful, useless carbon you found?) At the warp-in point. Anyone not approaching carefully will be decloaked.
Don’t sit at the warp in point. Let’s make them have to travel to get in range of you. And if they’ve decloaked you have chance to run away.
If there’s something that makes you nervous, or the little hairs on your neck twitch, or something “just appears” the correct responses is NOT:
“Oh, I wonder what’s happening?” - you are dying.
“I wonder if that big attack ship closing on me is friendly?” - nope.
“I wonder what his kill board looks like?” - it’s about to be fuller.
“What’s his name?” - death incarnate. Mr Incarnate to you. Do you want me to introduce you?
“How fast is he? How long do I have before he gets to me?” - that was a long and now irrelevant question.
The correct response is RUN LIKE ALL THE HOUNDS OF HELL ARE AFTER YOU. You can ask all the questions you like later. Later is the important bit after you punched “warp”. Where too is less important than the away from. But having a preset escape safety is always nice - a good hunter will follow you. So land and warp again. And again, and again. Make it so he can see which way you went.
And don’t warp for the obvious destination if you are trying to escape: if there’s only one gate out and he thinks you are running scared he’ll expect you to go to the gate…
Don’t fit the ship for tank or defence. Fit to reduce align time and improve your “warp away” responses.
The best reaction you want from the hunter is “drat, he got away”. His only other reaction is “got him, chalk another one up”. This isn’t kill or be killed. This is “live or die”.
Fit a cargo scanner so you can see if the site is worth the time to hack it. Don’t loose situational awareness.
Weapons are a luxury you don’t need.
This may sound like cowardice - it isn’t. It’s surviving to cash in your loot. A hack is only successful if you can profit from it. Knowing when to walk away from the table is the most important skill.
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If you’re fitting an exploration frigate for combat, you’ve already done something wrong. Unless it’s a Stratios, the odd Nestor, or a T3C, it’s not going to survive a fight with the average hunting ship (even if said hunter is an Astero, for some reason), and even then…
In my callow youth and ignorance I fought off an attack as an explorer. I was flying an Astero and hacking in low-sec. He warped off with us both deep in structure - a toss up who popped first, but he bottled it.
He had me scammed so I didn’t have a lot of options.
I like to think he’d have died before me. But that might just be post-combat elation.
I was a poor explorer fit and a modest combat fit.
I was lucky. I wouldn’t want to try that again.
But in general I fly a dedicated covert ops explorer, optimised and cloaked. Don’t get spotted, don’t get caught, don’t get pinned.
But @Aiden_Vayle, you are right - there are exceptions as with everything in New Eden.
If you’re starting probing every bonus helps. All astrometric skills to 4, astero/ cheaper more skill intensive covert-ops. I love the frostline mod for data/relic, a 2 in 1. I heard zeugma is better but haven’t checked.
Implants and rigs and you’re smoking a few days into the game. 100 mill a day on a few wh’s full of NPC relics and data is great. I wanna get one of those cloaky gas mining frigates for mining the 3-digit fullerine gas.
Regardless if it’s tacky to link to myself, I go into some depth about the more “advanced” concepts of scanning, and link to a very good video that gets you through the basics succintly.
How to take scanning to next level on day 1
I don’t yet see the value of Sisters, because I have been able to scan everything I’ve found in low-sec and WH-space with just Probe 1s.
And I think I scan fairly quickly. Anything below Level III I typically get in 2-3 ping sweeps.
Getting Level III or higher has sometimes been challenging, but I’d estimate 4-6 ping sweeps.
Ping sweeps = scans…just my phrasing.
The first issue here is speed, just hack, don’t think about it. There’s a flow to the numbers game (and not just the Rule of 6s which is the most BASIC rule, but for instance stay 1 off the edge). If you just follow that flow you’ll hack fast.
Do you have to kill the hostiles or you’re finding no-hostile sites? Because all the sites in WH I’ve been finding are hostile 
Wow!! Thanks for all the great advice … will take it to heart!
WH NPC pirate (blood raider etc) have no rats, only cans that are null rated as far as drops, one can netted me $70 mill in intact armor plates. Also the chance you’ll be jumped on by wh predators.
I use a covert ops and speed(using all available bonuses) makes more isk. This is for relic and data sites in cl1-3 wh’s. Bought me some new glasses today.
Then you want the Prospect. Fit it with an afterburner to orbit those higher class wormhole gas sites.
I don’t know exactly but after 20 minutes or so, there will be a sleeper response. Now keep calm and take a deep breath.
Your Prospect must not ever sit still in that gas site. Moving with the afterburner on will mitigate all incoming damage (3000dps or so) but you need to have a small shield booster or a small armor rep on.
I suggest you go for an armor tank, even though the ship is classified as a shield boat. Fit 2x eanm II, damage control and a small armor rep II.
Now you can dual-prop fit the Prospect in case you need to move fast but don’t ever use a mwd when sleepers are on grid, well the battleships ones.
A shield fit can work also if you want and all you need is a small shield booster II and and adaptive invulnerability field II, so it’s not too expensive.
Refitting in space is a double-edged sword.
Yes, you can bring a depot to fit a second gas harvester but the depot takes 1 potential deadly minute to anchor and is a dead giveaway that you are in system, so use with caution, preferably far away from celestials and things on d-scan.
Never forget the covert ops cloak on the prospect and a probe scanner, so you can probe your way back to civilization when your ore bay is full.
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Why do you care about sleepers showing-up? Why not just mine some and then leave? Or do you have to spend 20 minutes there to unlock access and get the goods?
Why never use MWD with sleepers?
Oh right, very good questions!
Those super-high value gases are super tiny. So in order to fill your 10k m³ ore bay, you will be spending a long time in or better around those clouds, orbiting and never ever sitting still.
Wormhole gas anomalies usually have 2 clouds and a beacon - the warp-in beacon where you always land when you warp to the site at 0km.
My advice is to always, always, always warp to such a site at 100km away.
There is also this “trick”, where you “activate” the site when you initiate but immediately abort your warp to the gas site or any other probable site in unknown space - even the “out-holes”.
This “activation” starts the clock for when those Sleepless Guardians or Sleepless Defenders appear and they always hang out or spawn at that warp-in beacon.
If you are in a wormhole, where someone “activated” the gas site on purpose to create traps or for clearing them later, you will land inside those spawns and you hopefully bookmarked the way you came in since you just lost your ship.
Just to be clear, the class 5 and class 6 gas site spawns will vaporize marauders in 5 seconds and force dreadnoughts to go into siege to tank them.
So when you warp to your gas site at 100km, you can bookmark both clouds, since both have high value and you can warp directly to the cloud you want to harvest first.
Make sure you have “harvestable cloud” in the “entities” tab of your overview settings activated to see the clouds (they have a cloud icon with a standard warp-in beacon icon between them).
Always warp to those clouds at 0km and start to “orbit at 500m” and turn your afterburner on.
Quoting from the “traits” tab of the Prospect, it states, “-5% signature radius per level” which will enable a technique that is called “sig-tanking”.
It means that the signature radius of your ship is so small, that the weapons of those sleeper battleships can only hit for your 10 or less % of the damage they would apply to anything with a bigger signature radius and there come the mwd warning to play.
In the “attributes” tab of any mwd, doesn’t matter which one, there is a row called “signature radius” and for all the meta and tech2 mwd’s it is 500%, except for the blue icon mwd’s and the “quadlif restrained” one, which only gives a 450% signature radius increase whenever you turn that mwd on.
That means, at any time you active a mwd on any ship, your signature radius increases and large weapons will have an easy time doing a lot more hurt to your tiny ship.
Interceptors, Interdictors, Assault Frigate and Cruisers have a bonus that mitigates some of that mwd penalty, so activating a mwd on those ships will not be as painful.
The difference between an afterburner and the mwd is not only the signature radius but speed.
A mwd will give you up to 625% the base speed of your ship, whereas an afterburner “only” gives you around 150 to 200% more speed but important for you is that the afterburner decreases the amount of incoming damage with your small signature radius by a factor of around 90-ish % but only at 90-100% afterburner speed.
And of course an afterburner doesn’t increase your signature radius and cannot be turned of by a scram.
It is also the reason why you can “tank” the damage you will receive with a small t2 shield booster (yes the small and not the medium one) or a small t2 armor rep.
Whatever you do, do not be alarmed when (as in not IF) the sleeper battleships will catch up to you, they will neut your shield booster and afterburner of for a brief moment, so be advised to re-active those modules as soon as you can.
The few times I did this, those battleships gave up neuting me out after 2 attempts but you never know.
Every time I make a crucial observation and post it here in the forums, something magically changes on Tranquility in the next few days without warning or documentation.
Logistic cruisers that are fit and flown properly use this method of tanking also but don’t tell anyone, it’s a secret and the reason many, many, many carrier, super carrier, titan and dread pilots hate me like the plague.
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Vital core reserves, when i last played class 4 rarely, mostly in 6, check price and volume of best gas.
Collect until sleeper shows uip, gtfo fast or die.
5 mill a min with 2.
Condensed version
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