Exploration

I have played Eve for a while now, occassionally letting it slide when life gets busy but always coming back to it. Most of this time I have spent in Gallente highsec missioning slowly building up a few ships and skilsl to fly them. I then shifted to wh space and spent a few months there before getting bored of waiting for guild members to log on. This time in WH space did cause me to buy a second account that spawned a fully capable miner and now orca pilot. I then wandered of to Red v Blue to pvp some before joining SiRadio for some 0,0 shenanigans. unfortunately they were turfed out of Providence shorlty after I arrived. After a while in the Great Wildlands I returned to high sec to try out exploration.

I immediatly got lucky as the first site turned into an escalation, it wandered through Gallente space and eventually out into low sec. I managed bought myself a lowly cruiser so not as to risk my shiny Ishtar and pulled it off for some nice shiny loot that sold for enough to cover an unfortunate foray into WH space where I lost my Ishatar. Haven't managed to get to lucky since.

In an effort to up my success rate I decided to have a look at Placid, Gallente low sec with a high sec island in it. Like many explorers before me I came across a few problems. To scan I use my rigged Helios with Sister Launcher and probes, this with the recent skillpoint re-imbursement due to the learning skills being removed has me scanning things down quite easily. Once promising sites have been bookmarked I then return to a local station to pick up a combat/ exploration ship...

For high-sec my combat ship was passive shield Ishtar which was over tanked for anything it came up against. But an Ishtar is quite expensive to be flying through low sec so I began to look round for something else and came across the ship that cannot be scanned out with probes, the unprobe-able ship. Whatever is chosen it must be able to fight battleships spawns not unlike L4 missions, this rules out T1 cruisers. On the list is:

Myrmidon BC: dual rep set up with codebreaker, analyzer, salvager, drones and blasters - to hell with the signature radius, cheap
Ishtar HAC: high armour resists, single MAR, exchangeable mid slot, 3 rails - medium expense, not probe-able, drones a risk
Proteus T3C: high armour resists, single MAR, exchangeable mid slot, 5 heavy neutrons, not probe-able, no drones, v.expensive