This is the biggest misconception about PVP.
radar range is 2 SU. As long as you don’t fly in a straight line between planets, your chances of getting ganked are negligible. There just aren’t enough pirates out there to cover the possible routes. Space is huge.
Asteroids.. so imagine, there are dozens of asteroids out there. And the travel time between them is 20 minutes to an hour or more, assuming you had them all mapped out by proximity. Now imagine you are a pirate. And you know there is someone out there mining one of these asteroids. But you don’t know which one. Are you going to spend your whole allotment of playtime for that day flying from one empty asteroid to the next, hoping to catch a miner. ?
If you are mining an asteroid close to the safezone, or an exotic, there is a good chance that a pirate will come along eventually. There are lots of people out here in disposable haulers getting ore. Getting caught by pirates is rare. This is experience btw, not theory.
I am not interested in pvp (in this game anyway), so I don’t pvp. The effect of pvp on the non pvp population is dramatically overblown imo.
-in before “ I can’t get plasma without joining legion”. None of the people who typically complain about pvp have any use for that anyway.