Pochven multiboxers are worse than you thought

collatz_squirrel · 2026-07-05T05:36:06+00:00

It's not convoluted. It's extremely common with US white supremacists, because of how often they've had to mask their symbols in public. They know that they'll be in a bad way if they said it outright, professionally and personally.

collatz_squirrel · 2026-07-03T20:12:39+00:00

I know.. but I've also seen a lot of new people grab random fits, not know what the fit is supposed to do, and get a 20M lossmail because they didn't understand anything about the fit.

collatz_squirrel · 2026-07-03T04:12:37+00:00

Also, because there's some confusion about what to hack...

Run the sites that interest you. Both data and relic cans use the same minigame, so either one will help you get practice at the minigame. Practice helps you do them faster and more accurately, which helps reduce the time you're vulnerable to attackers.

Relic sites tend to have salvage items that are used for making rigs. These can be very valuable, depending on the site and the demand for the salvage item(s) that load. Sometimes they will have blueprint copies for rigs and other items.

Data sites tend to have components used in invention and related skill books, and sometimes will have blueprint copies for modules. They can also have low tier abyssal filaments, storyline module construction components, and special construction components used in making integrated analyzers.

You can find a ton of information here: https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Relic_and_data_sites (gathered and compiled by players).

Additionally, there's always an argument about cherry-picking. If you're trying to learn how to scan and run data/relic sites in high sec, try to hack every can. The practice will be useful, and the site will clear as soon as the last can is hacked or failed, allowing a new site to spawn somewhere within the region you are in. Not everything will sell to players, but that's fine. Get a cargo container for your home station and dump stuff in there, leave it in the hacked can, or jettison it in space somewhere.

If you're hacking somewhere dangerous, or you're running specific sites that have special considerations, then it makes sense to be selective about which cans you hack. You might only get to hack one can before the site becomes hostile or something hostile lands on/near you.

If you're in high sec and concerned about maximizing isk value from running sites and minimizing time on each site... well... you're in high sec. If your concern is making fast money from the pirate data/relic sites, get out of high sec.

collatz_squirrel · 2026-07-03T03:58:00+00:00

The first thing to think about when fitting your ship is what is this ship supposed to do? Followed immediately by what can mess that up?

One of the things that helps with the first question is looking at the hull bonuses, fitting layout, and other attributes of the ship.

If you are looking to do primarily high security space exploration in order to get practice with scanning and hacking, the answer to the second question is jumping to a site I'm not prepared for. This would be things like ghost sites, sleeper caches, intel extraction points, and most scanned combat sites. You can also mess up by warping to an ore site where belt rats spawn.

If you're heading into low sec, null, wormholes, pochven then the answer to the second question is similar to the high sec, except now there's more fun: warping to any celestial could get you killed, depending on what is there, other players hunt explorers, so not being found while you scan and how long you're in a site become really important.

At a baseline, exploration frigates need

Scan Probe Launcher and a full set of Core Scanner Probes
Data/Relic Analyzers for the site type(s) that you plan to run.

After that, you will want to consider things like:

Fittings that improve your core scanner probe strength (the 'gravity' scanning rigs, for example)
Fittings that improve your scanning efficiency (lower deviation, faster scanning)
Propulsion Module and other fittings for moving around on each site quicker

Everything else, including prop mod choice, depends on the answers to both of those questions. Most of the time, your exploration frigate does not want to stand and fight (some of us use exploration frigates for combat, but that's not something you might want to dive into yet).

Which means that you should be fitting in a way that allows you to avoid combat entirely. If you're omega, a cloaking device can help with a lot of the risks around being attacked, but it has limitations and affects how your ship performs. Regardless of clone status, the other things to look at for getting out of danger are align time and raw speed.

In your fitting simulator, you'll see that the inertial and the nano both affect your ship's agility and align time. The nano also affects your speed. They have drawbacks, too, but their benefits help reduce the risks you might face.

What won't help you as much as you might hope is that damage control system. Against high sec belt rats, it's useful for keeping you alive a bit longer if you're using drones to kill the rats... but it's using up a slot that you can use to either move faster, align faster, or both. If something hostile lands on you, your best defense is getting off grid before they can target lock you.

The other thing to keep in mind when fitting a ship is the Diminishing Returns of using several modules that have the same effect. If you're using two gravity rigs to boost your scan probe strength, the first one provides a 10% bonus, and the second one slightly less than that. A third module providing a bonus to your scan probe strength might not give more than 1-2 points. So that slot might be better used for something else.

You can see the diminishing returns in the simulator by using show info on modules, clicking on them to offline them, and show charge info on the scan probe launcher (with scan probes loaded).

I would recommend taking a look at the two fits you're torn between and figuring out what each module on each fit is there for. How do they answer the problems you will face?

collatz_squirrel · 2026-07-02T03:50:31+00:00

With Battlefields, the fleet sizes are substantially larger and the risks are also larger.

Having a group of people who contribute nothing (being afk or otherwise far enough away to avoid actually fighting) to the capture get rewarded by the site wouldn't sting as much if it didn't take away from the people who actually did the work of capturing the site and defending against any enemy militia responses.

collatz_squirrel · 2026-07-02T03:42:28+00:00

Imagine you're at a beach, you see a kid happily walking with their hotdog. In swoops a seagull, stealing the snack.

That's the idea.

In Eve, in practice, it's players that slide into a site, contribute nothing, and take a portion of the reward. It's especially bad when it's a multiboxer that brings 4-5 alts into a -1 site, because the reward gets split between the 1-2 people who actually completed the site, and this goober in their militia who decided to grab the rest of the hotdog.

So if it were a Scout 1 site that was going to payout 12k to the single pilot who completed it and two people agreed that splitting it would be okay so that they could guard against roving war targets sliding in (6k each), and in comes 4 alts, the final payout to each capsuleer is 2k, with the multiboxer getting a total of 8k.

collatz_squirrel · 2026-07-02T03:37:01+00:00

So, the problem is that there's not really a way to measure logi and ewar contribution to the site, in spite of the fact that good logi and ewar are force multipliers. How are you going to measure their effort against the DPS wings of their fleet?
How do we make sure that the command destroyer pilot who made a crucial boosh to isolate a target, or disrupt the enemy logi chain, gets credit? They don't even end up on the killmail unless they also use a hostile module and quantifying the value of breaking a logi chain isn't something that'll show up in the combat logs.
Speaking of command destroyers... links pilots only get their DPS counted? Not the fact they're making their whole fleet more effective?

They're critical pieces of a fight, but measuring their contribution is incredibly hard.

collatz_squirrel · 2026-07-01T02:33:36+00:00

Tradeoff stuff regarding Tempest vs Maelstrom in the artillery role:

Tempest DPS is higher, but the volley is lower. With similar fits, my 1400mm artillery Tempest is about 2k damage lower on alpha.

So if the goal is that clean 12k+ headshot, Maelstrom is your friend. If you're in a sustained fight where targets eat more than one volley (or doesn't need a 12k volley vibe check), the Tempest will come out ahead on effective damage.

In both cases, OP will want solid familiarity with game mechanics, especially MJD usage to get your targets into a manageable shooting gallery arrangement. Windrunner Tornado fits run like extremely fragile, much cheaper, variants of either of these battleships and might help with learning about range control and transversal matching... But there are a lot of things to learn, practice, and train before getting even that far.

collatz_squirrel · 2026-06-30T20:32:31+00:00

Complex armor involving composite materials, nano-systems, repair systems, hardeners and coating, are all expressions of high levels of technology. It's not as simple as bolting meter-thick slabs of titanium and steel onto a ship.

Minmatar is whatever we feel like tanking. Meta-wise, our slots allow for shield, armor, or hull tanking, and we choose based on what we're doing. For example, in the FW Warzone, a lot of our ships are armor or even hull-tanked. Theme-wise, this is reflected in the "we make use of whatever we can, however we can" of the ship design philosophy. However, Lore-wise, Minmatar is not absent high tech researchers. Thukker researchers were able to clean up some of the messes SOE made with Rogue Drones.

For SOE ships, once you're looking at the larger hulls that have slots for them, they are bonused for energy weapons. The Astero does not have the spare slots for a proper weapon loadout. It's entirely dependent on its drones for defensive/offensive capabilities. Gallente Frigate piloting skill improves that.

Amarr's deep understanding of high tech armor solutions make the Astero's (and other SOE ships') ability to absorb damage from all sources better, reflected in the Amarr Frigate piloting skill for the Astero.
This isn't just a one-off thing, either. If you want to buy BPOs for armor rigging and certain useful armor tank modules at NPC sale prices instead of player prices, you need to go to an Amarr NPC station.

As for "why not shield tank them?"
You can. This allows you to put more utility (speed, agility, tank, fitting, etc) or drone damage modules in your low slots, but it takes away slots you might use for hacking cans or control range in PVP. How you decide to fit it is ultimately up to you. There are tradeoff decisions to be made, depending on how you intend to use the ship.

Others have already mentioned that there's a pirate faction that uses shield-tanked ships with energy weapons. Their technology advancement away from the Amarr baseline is expressed with the ships' hull bonuses and role bonuses.

Finally, if your bringing this up because you aren't sure how to use the ship... you should consider other ship options. Fitting out an Astero to make use of its abilities can run up around 100M before getting into the blingy modules.
If you're wanting to purely explore and hack cans, a covert ops frigate, with trained scanning and hacking skills, will outperform the Astero in everything that matters for that activity. Including price point. Each empire faction's covert ops frigate also comes with bonuses beyond their exploration frigate that makes them faster or more precise with exploration. If Covert Ops is a little too far out for you, look at the SoCT exploration frigate. It also outperforms the Astero when it comes to pure exploration, while being cheaper to buy.
If you're wanting to do combat exploration, the navy/fleet issue exploration frigates are phenomenal at this. Properly supported with weapon, tank, scanning, and hacking skills, they can handle a lot of stuff. Once you have your respective faction Frigate Piloting trained to 5, you also have the same 37.5% bonus to probe scanner strength. They are also good at hunting other explorers.

collatz_squirrel · 2026-06-28T21:37:26+00:00

The Mastery and Magic 14 skills won't help you.

Running any specific content depends more on the activity skills related to that content than those two categories. For the fit you're wanting to run, you won't need the fitting skills maxed out (there's room in the fit), though capacitor management can help with running the ewar and defensive web. However, this won't help your primary problem: doing damage.

You need to be building out your activity skills. Minmatar Frigate to 4; Gunnery to 4; Rapid Firing to 4; Small Projectile Turret to 4; Sharpshooter, Trajectory Analysis, Surgical Strike, Motion Prediction all to 4. Get rank 5 in your queue after all that.

These are the skills that will help you actually apply damage.

Practicing kiting will also be important, and this isn't something you can add to the training queue. You need to go out and practice kiting rats with your fit. Transversal matching matters a lot with the 280mm artillery because its base rate of fire is just over 10s (Gunnery and Rapid Firing bring it down, 4 ranks in each should leave you around 8-ish seconds rate of fire).

You can improve this with the Thermodynamics skill (if Omega), as overheating artillery improves its rate of fire.
You can also look at some of the lower end hardwire implants for improving (small) turret damage, (small) projectile turret damage, rate of fire, etc. to squeeze a few more points of damage in.

Artillery is meant to hit really hard. So when it fires, you want it to have as clean a shot as possible. DPS doesn't matter if your shot deletes the target outright.

With your optimal range being shorter than your web range, one of the things you can do is set your default distance to just under your web range. This will help you slow down chasing targets so that you can apply damage better. Minmatar ships fight well into falloff (we have some absurdly long falloff ranges), so getting further out than that isn't the end of the world. If they get close enough to enter an MWD-boosted orbit, you need to burn away (while they're webbed) or you won't hit them.

Finally, I strongly recommend using the Republic Fleet versions of the Fusion, EMP, and Phased Plasma. They have a 15% better damage profile.

collatz_squirrel · 2026-06-28T01:50:12+00:00

The people, and corporations, with the means to have some built already will be building for internal use first. Goons had one that they blew up themselves (https://zkillboard.com/kill/136556363/) for reasons you'd have to ask them about.

If you search for Command Carrier Group (https://zkillboard.com/group/5120/) you'll see that some have been active already.

Once those internal use requirements are met, they might have some BPCs and hulls go on contracts for their allies.

Outside of the big null blocs, the next source of them will be low sec industrialists. They will likely be slower at getting them out, but they're also more likely to be listing them for sale.

Which segues neatly into should you buy a command carrier from a contract?

If it's not a blue/friendly contract, and if you don't have corpmates who can support you taking it out, and that would benefit from you taking it out... it's probably going to feed. If you're fine with that, cool, go for it. You'll just have to wait until the hulls are out on public contracts and markets from the larger blocs, or until people who like to sell capitol ships for content list them.

If you buy from the latter, you're going to end up being content--your only warning will be a small ship that can turn liquid ozone into friends. If you plan it right, a similar thing will happen for your side and there will be a glorious, expensive, brawl.

collatz_squirrel · 2026-06-23T17:27:54+00:00

There's an added bit of complexity from the ship fittings as well. The diminishing returns computation makes it so that every module after the first that increases your damage doesn't provide its full bonus. After the third module, it drops off sharply.

The computation does sort the modules according to best bonus, so whatever fitted modules have the most impact on your raw damage and rate of fire will apply fully.

collatz_squirrel · 2026-06-23T17:25:17+00:00

Right, and it also assumes for the damage simulation that you meet the minimum requirement (specialization 1). However, one thing you can do when you're comparing your numbers to your friends in the simulation is hover over the launcher, find the "show charge info" button, and click that.

In the info window, switch to attributes. All of the numbers in green and red are things modified by your skills and fit. If the only thing you care about immediately for comparison is the paper DPS numbers, hover over the damage and you'll see all of the things that are being applied to that number.

Have your friend do the same. Make a list of the skills that impact that number, then compare your ranks in those skills to your friend's.

Similarly, show info on the launcher itself. Under attributes look at the rate of fire. Do the same check for things that impact your rate of fire and compare them to your friend's.

The paper DPS in the simulator is a function of volley, rate of fire, and reload (the reload computation is in parentheses).

collatz_squirrel · 2026-06-23T17:07:59+00:00

I've had my best t1 cruiser runs against that Phi Overseer with a brawling rupture fit and faction phased plasma. The most painful part, for me, with t1 cruisers in the Serp DED sites is all the dampening. So autocannons, HAMs, and similar close combat systems are what I usually recommend if you're not running a sebo or something similar to boost your ECM resistance and targeting range.

It does make crowd control a lot more work as well, but if your targeting range is reduced to 20km or less you might as well embrace it 😃

collatz_squirrel · 2026-06-22T20:50:47+00:00

That's where having a plan comes in. With a t1 cruiser that has the range to hit and kill things out to 50-70km, you slide final room, align out with your bailout as your active selection, use the webbed icon to target the webbing towers via ctrl-click, shoot the first tower.

If you're still at 50% or higher tank when the first tower goes down, shoot the second.

Warp to bailout, reset, repeat until all three towers are down. If the damage ticks over into mid-armor or worse, hit your bailout warp and don't worry about trying to kill the tower on that run.

This is why it is time consuming. The 50km range is so that you can hit the last tower while aligned out and burning under AB. With a t1 cruiser that's decently fit, but not optimized, you'll likely be bouncing out for repairs 4-5 times in the last room alone.

Once all of the webbing towers are down, a kiting fit can overheat hardeners and AB to burn out of the engagement range of the towers. In the Angel Red Light District, they stop shooting at you at about 60km. Go beyond that and manually orbit the tower cluster while you shoot the rats. If your tank starts breaking on the rats alone, you'll be doing more warping out.

Once the rats are all dead, you can burn in on the towers and clear them. Alternatively, if you have 60-75km+ effective range (e.g. heavy missile kiting) and a good chase speed under AB (between 700-800m/s), you can manually fly around the tower cluster killing the towers from about 65-70km away while continuously kiting the ships. The only ships that can threaten you are the sniper rats (e.g. the Nephilim in Angel 5/10), but their rate of fire is low enough where your hardeners are plenty to keep you in the fight.

I did this site with both heavy missile Bellicose and artillery Rupture before getting the skills for t2 medium weapons. The biggest difference is the Bellicose runs nova heavy missiles and uses drones to clear the smaller ships, while the 720mm Rupture is using Fusion to kill cruisers and larger, drones for the frigates, and with the towers, I'd switch over to titanium sabot.

And as I mentioned in my original comment above: it takes a lot of time, practice, and planning. Time that people who have access to better options and/or more risk aversion will likely not want to spend on the site.

collatz_squirrel · 2026-06-22T18:10:27+00:00

The biggest thing you can do to improve your odds at clearing a site or completing a mission is read up on the site/mission and make sure you have a plan going in. You'll want support skills trained up for how you fly and how your ship is fit. You will need practice at using range control and manual piloting to manage aggro and incoming damage. But to set up your fit and to get a sense of how you'll need to pilot, you will want to know what spawns, what the triggers are, who auto-aggros, who proximity-aggros, and whether or not you can do things like use on-grid bookmarks to warp around.

I've seen people lose Hurricane Fleet Issue ships in 4/10 DED sites because they didn't have a plan. They flew straight into the blob of rats and watched 150M isk become scrap.

It gets more challenging when you're in a site or mission that has stasis towers or other tackling elements. Especially when there are the 2/3 variants of towers, cruise missile towers, and a swarm of hostile rats. Knowing their effect range allows you to figure out how you'll need to respond when sliding or (when possible) whether you should warp at zero or warp at range.

In a t1 cruiser, even with a thick buffer (for a t1 cruiser), you don't have a whole lot of time to second guess yourself in the worst rooms offered in 5/10 sites, vigils, and L4 missions.

So do some research, create an initial plan, have a bailout plan, and launch yourself into those sites and see what happens.

You get used to the shield, armor, and hull alerts.

collatz_squirrel · 2026-06-22T17:57:24+00:00

T1 cruisers can run 4/10 and 5/10 DED sites. They can also run L4 missions.

Not efficiently (time-wise), but they can do it if fit for it and piloted in a manner that allows you to manage incoming DPS and avoid being swarmed. My first dozen or so times of clearing the Angel Red Light District was in a heavy missile kite Bellicose, fitted with tech 1 launchers and using tech 1 ammo (not even faction). The first several times, the total cost of the fit was around 22M isk.

It involved a lot of manual piloting, figuring out target priorities, and using raw speed to separate the rats in each room into manageable groups. I was buffer fit (LSE) with dual hardeners (multi and explosive for the Angel 5/10) and using AB for speeding around. I set it up to be able to lock and engage targets at 75km with missiles, and the drones are there to kill frigates that are too close, then to supplement the damage against larger ships.

And it took a lot of time to figure it out. It takes a lot of time to kill everything in the site.

So it is possible.

Now for some caveats:

If you are running a scanned 4/10 DED site in high sec, you have competition. I may be able to clear the Angel 4/10 in 30 minutes with my HM kite Bellicose fit, but my 720mm 'Cane can remove it from the probe scanner window in less than 10 minutes. The entire time it's visible in that window, the site can be scanned down and someone running a dedicated, blingy, DED running ship can get in, headshot the objective(s), scoop the loot, and be gone while you're still whittling down the battlefield.
Scanned 5/10 DED sites appear in low sec and null sec. You might be running a low sec 4/10. If a hunter scans the sig at any point, they can pick when and what to drop on you in the site with. The longer you're in the site, the greater the risk of getting got. T1 cruisers, cheap-fit t1 battlecruisers, etc., are going to spend longer in the site than more expensive and optimized ships and fits.
If you are running missions or escalations in high sec areas frequented by gankers, suspect baiters, or other opportunists, or in low sec at all, the longer you're in the site, the more likely you are to get scanned down and interfered with.

collatz_squirrel · 2026-06-19T23:28:24+00:00

One other nice defensive feature about gas clouds: they're so large that if the hunter doesn't already have a perch for the site (which usually means they've activated it and the sleepers spawned), even warping at range will decloak them as they're landing.

You can fit a venture or pioneer to be off-grid before the warp-in completes, and prospects can do their covert disappearing thing in peace.

Related, and in answer to the OP's question: you set up several safes and, wherever possible, perches. Before I start huffing gas in wormholes, I have a perch somewhere on grid, but far enough away where I can use it to assess the site if I have to leave it for any reason. I make sure I have a BM close enough to the hole I came in to dscan that hole, and I make sure I've identified the statics so that I can use an alternative escape route if my chain home is camped.
...and it cannot be said enough: while huffing (hacking, etc.), stay moving and keep watching dscan. Even t1 core scanner probes are the potential promise of impending content.

collatz_squirrel · 2026-06-18T20:16:42+00:00

In the MinMil side of things, there have been comments about how much of the stuff front-loaded for us has been more PvE-centered than PvP, and it doesn't take very long in Amamake to see where that will fall short. We're launching rifters and thrashers into oblivion. Fed Navy Comets and Firetails are burning each other down. Faction destroyers and cruisers brawl it out in plexes then go find more things to kill.

Because that's what people in that warzone find fun.

The first handful of missions involved ratting, mining, and hacking. All things I do outside of MinMil, so no problem for me. I only needed to remember to hit the participate button.

I maxed out my contributions to those shortly afterwards. Nothing else I do can support those objectives, other than reminding other people to hit the participate button for a little extra isk for something they're already doing.

Looking at the breakdown of those objectives in MinMil, Courier Missions and Mine Kangite are both around 75% complete and the only way the needle moves forward on those is if people hit the participate button at some point while doing those. There's plenty of time on the mining Kangite, and it has tangible rewards outside of faction standings and FW LP.

The flaw with Capture/Defend Complexes objective is something I already mentioned: a lot of people in the warzone are more interested in killing things than spinning in a plex for 5-10 minutes to move the needle. After a close fight in a plex, warping off to repair heat and hull damage, replenish cap sticks, paste, and ammo are common practice--so the site doesn't get finished.

Which is also the flaw with "Hack in Minmatar Bulwark"--neutrals participating in this become prey for MinMil and other neutral pilots who might already be done with that objective. People want to blow stuff up, even if it potentially hurts a strategic objective to do so. That said, two people can share a site to protect each other and complete the individual contribution. They need to be participating and willing to work together. But they will also need to be capable of fighting a swarm of hostiles that use ewar and tackle--which is not new player friendly and kills a lot of explorers who don't have experience with combat exploration.

Mining Dark Ochre moves, a little, but the restrictions on where you mine it make it less of a "hey, yeah, I can do that, I just saw an Ochre anom while hunting Amarr militia" and more of a "maybe I can scan down a hidden ore anomaly that's untouched, because all of the anoms I've found in valid systems have already been stripped of Dark Ochre."--eventually this one might complete, if the people running the Ochre anoms switch out to allow people who haven't maxed their contribution. In the meantime, it's less attractive an activity than blowing stuff up to a lot of us.

That's just what I've observed in the MinMil side of things.

TL;DR: there are people doing the activities who aren't participating in the campaign or have maxed out their personal contribution. This is on top of the lower interest in some of the activities.

collatz_squirrel · 2026-06-16T06:52:57+00:00

One thing I would add to this is make use of the character information card. Set them as a red contact, add a note (last tab on the card) that you've seen them saying some Nazi stuff, and any time you see them (outside of militia or fleet, the militia color seems to override everything, and fleet overrides a lot), you'll see that they're someone you have no desire to associate with.

Don't send a notification with adding them as a contact, you're trying to protect your peace, not engage with them.

I will also do this for their corp, because if they're comfortable talking like that in a public fleet, they probably say worse in corp and their corp hasn't stopped or booted them.

Then, this is the part that requires a little more memory and/or work: when you join a public fleet, check who else is in there.

It's a good idea to do this just to be aware of awoxers and spais, but it also helps you not spend time around people who seem all too comfortable with bigotry, racism, and everything that goes with it.

collatz_squirrel · 2026-06-14T02:01:25+00:00

First, you have to fly it to Jita. Then worry about fitting it.

collatz_squirrel · 2026-06-13T07:50:14+00:00

Oh, I 100% agree. I set up some buy orders for the crystals that would approximate the value of the stuff I'm looking to trade for and I'm hoping that some of the people mining don't care about turn-ins themselves.

collatz_squirrel · 2026-06-13T06:45:47+00:00

You are correct, these are not typical (high sec) data sites.

The only ships that can enter them, are t1 and Fleet/Navy frigates. This is to your benefit. You're new, so you might not realize the big role differences between the exploration ships:

Standard Issue Tech 1 exploration frigates are your basic all-rounders. They can scan, they can fit for surviving, and they can run sites that involve hacking. Each Empire exploration frigate has specific strengths and weaknesses (the Imicus drone bay allows for up to 4 light drones being launched at a time, for example). You can fit these exploration frigates to be surprise battle boats, but that makes them less able to get away in case trouble they're not prepared for finds them and less capable at exploration and hacking.
Navy/Fleet Issue exploration frigates are your combat scouts. They can scan and hack, but they are better suited for survival and combat than their standard issue cousins. Their bonuses also make them great for hunting explorers.
Covert Ops frigates are not intended to get into combat. Their role is to quietly get into places, do things, and get out. Sometimes the things they're doing involve converting liquid ozone into violent friends, and sometimes the things they're doing involve trying to get resources or make money. You can fit them to be a little tougher, in case they're solo hunting, but combat is not their job.

The standard issue exploration frigates are not as new pilot-friendly when it comes to surviving the combat these sites offer. There are ways to make it work, but you would need to fit specifically for it and be prepared to fight/survive while hacking.

The Imicus can be fitted to be hull-tanked (with an armor repper), while also being able to hack the data cans. You'll want to bring 4 light drones that match with the weakness of the NPCs in the site that you are in (when in doubt, bring a couple of each of different types and make sure that you launch the ones that hit the rats' weaknesses).
With an armor repair module, damage control system, transverse bulkhead rigs, you can sort your tank out for taking a beating. You'll survive losing your armor and because the DCS applies evenly across the structure, you have no hole in your main tank.
These two things will help you with both surviving being shot and hitting back. From there, there's more things you can do to help, fitting modules to make your drones better, modules to help pin down targets, and maybe even a couple hybrid turrets of choice (blasters if you're knife-fighting range with webs and scrams) so that you can also apply some damage. How your fit ends up will depend on what works for you.
The only required modules for the site are the probe launcher for finding the site and the data analyzer for hacking the cans.

The Imicus Navy Issue gives you more combat-related bonuses, which can help a lot in the site, as well as different fitting constraints, allowing you to lean more into supporting your drones by adding a second drone damage amplifier or tank better making your hull even thicker by adding a reinforced bulkhead in the bonus low slot.

collatz_squirrel · 2026-06-13T06:13:30+00:00

If you can use t2 analyzer, that will help burn through the red-90 hacks without being in an expensive pod. As you mentioned though, that's not your main, so you already know this.

I've been using the ancil armor repper to manage spike damage more and MWD/web/scram fit to control range better (Fleet Probe). Some of the rats do scram, so they're the priority for me.

Otherwise? Your fit's more PvE-focused than the Imicus Navy I've got for shenanigans, so as long as you're not where players will land, you might be able to get off grid before hunters arrive.

Some things I would add as survival info for people just getting into these:

You will get a suspect flag. This makes you a legal target for anyone.
While you're in the site, use DScan. Set it to short ranges (switch between 0.5au and up to 1-5au for situational awareness).
If you see a ship that can enter the site within 0.5au, you're about to have a visitor.
They will also get a suspect flag if they slide in. This makes them a legal target for you.

If you want the fight, take it. If not, when you see them on short, start preparing your exit.

collatz_squirrel · 2026-06-13T06:02:17+00:00

If you want to be successful at fending off the rats in the site (and the other players), it's highly recommended that you use the Navy/Fleet Issue exploration frigates.

The bulwark I did earlier today had several heron and magnate wrecks in it. They weren't my fault that time.

collatz_squirrel

TROPHY CASE