Heya,
First of all you need to realise that there's a lot of misconceptions and boogieman stories in regards to exploration, so lots of the info you'll hear can or will be wrong. I was lucky enough to run into someone who DOES know what he's talking about and was willing to teach me.
Everything I'll state is based on high sec exploration because that's generally what you'll be doing for now.
First to clear up a few of those misconceptions:
- yes, high sec is VERY profitable for exploration
- no, you don't need fancy ships, rigs, implants or sister launcher/probes
- you don't need a special scanning ship and then switch to a special combat ship
- yes, you can do it as a newbie as long as you keep to certain sites
There's two types of explorations;
- going for data/relic sites only, this requires no combat at all and can be done in any ship and because of that the most obvious is one of the racial probe bonused frigates. Module wise all you need is a core probe launcher, data analyzer and relic analyzer. Extra modules could be a cargo scanner and small gravity rigs to help you determine which cans to pick up before you start hacking, perhaps some rigs to help your scanning but that is essentially it. For specific info on data/relic sites read .
While this can be done by 3 day old characters and you can make some 5-20 mil Isk per site I wouldn't recommend this route (unless you're REALLY new and this is all you can buy and use). While these sites make *some* money and for true newbies it's actually quite a lot, you're possibly missing out on much more isk so lets talk about the second type of exploration.
- combat sites, these require you to kill NPCs and possibly structures in the hopes of cool loot, that loot can be silly stuff sometimes worth 500k and other times worth 400 mil, you never really know. Generally though a good site drop is somewhere between 30-90 mil. To me part of the fun is in that randomness, it feels like opening birthday presents; you never know what you're getting.
There's two types of combat sites; signatures and anomalies. I wouldn't bother with anomalies at all (you can disable them in the scanning window) because profit per hour is low compared to the other types.
Ship wise to start out you'll need a frigate or preferably a destroyer which will allow you to do the data/relic sites you were already aiming for and the easier combat sites as well.
Fitting wise have a look here, this is everything a basic explorer needs. Algos - Basic explorer and yes, drones are fine. Don't believe the "waah, drones suck", they're awesome and ideal for exploration. You can translate that to your racial destroyer of choice but I'll keep stating that drone based ships are ideal for exploration, for various reasons.
Go to
this site , set it to your faction space of choice, click apply and bookmark that new URL (I set it as my homepage for easy access). That website is outdated due to the scanning changes but the info per combat site is still very useful. So you start scanning and at some point it'll give you the name of the site and you'll look it up on that website, click on it and it'll tell you what to shoot, in which order and how to get the cool loot.
You're ONLY interested in DED sites (1/10, 2/10 and possibly 3/10 if you know what you're doing) and the Unrated sites (Hideouts and Lookouts, do NOT enter Watch or Vigil sites because you WILL blow up until you get a much better ship). Ignore the drone sites (haunted yard, desolate site etc), they're not worth it.
To get a better idea on scanning itself or hacking just find some recent youtube guides.
Have fun :P