Exploration career for solo gameplay

Question

Recently I started to play Eve Online with in mind the world of exploration and scanning.

I plan to play as a lonestar most of the time (I'm in a corp anyway) since I tend to log at strange hours usually.

My char already is training some required skills (aiming for the basic Cartographer certificate right now) and all I did till now was read this guide and complete all the Agent Career Missions related to explorations.

Now what?

The question is just this: what should I do now? I saw a lot of websites around, but they all talk about lowsec or nullsec zones. I'm planning to stay in highsec for a while, till I get acquainted with this career and all that is involved. Where should i look for sites to explore? I don't mind some fighting from time to time, but if I could find some "relaxed" exploration sites (go-scan-explore-grab_an_item-get back/report to someone) to improve my economy and have some fun exploring space, that would be what I'm looking for! Any help? Is this possible, or all exploration sites lend to a brutal fight with pirates, requiring me a backup fleet?

Thanks all!

Answer 1

Buy an exploration frigate (Heron, Probe, Magnate and Imicus) and start scanning down sites in high-sec. While they aren't very good at combat, Relic and Data sites no longer have any enemy NPCs in them, so you don't need any combat capabilites. And in the very beginning, the bonus to scanning should be very helpful when your scanning skills are still low and you don't have much experience with scanning. Later on you should be able to scan high-sec sites in a ship without a scanning bonus.

You probably can't run any DED complexes in an exploration frigate, but you should be able to run the Data and Relic sites easily.

I would recommend to learn scanning with an exploration frigate, and if you find a site that is too difficult you can reship to a combat ship. Once you are comfortable scanning and want to continue it, you probably want to change to either a combat ship, a Sisters of Eve ship like the Stratios or a T3 cruiser. But for the beginning you should just try it out and scan some sites, and don't be too disappointed if you only find wormholes in the beginning (don't go through them).

Answer 2

The lower the security level, the better loot you'll find. While you can scan best with a dedicated scanning ship, I tend to explore with an Omen Navy Issue, fitted with turrets and a scan probe launcher, allowing me to scan down a site, dock, switch the probe launcher for the right tool for the job, then easily complete the site. The standard sites usually don't have enemies, but the best (and most fun) are the deadspace complexes, which are about like low level normal missions. If you want to only do non-combat scanning, just avoid any sites which show as (I think) Unusual instead of the standard scan types.