I used to live in wormhole space and this was a common question for us as we would often have to move wormhole loot through low sec or high sec while we were at war. We're talking small size but high value loot. We decided that cov ops were generally the best ships to use to transport our loot due to their small sig radius, high agility, and ability to cloak. The method we used was jump through a gate, hit the warp button and hit the cloak immediately after. That leaves about a second window during which you can be locked, but with such a small sig radius nothing but the best skilled (both in game skills and good reactions from the pilot) sensor boosted interceptors will be able to lock a cov ops. Additionally, the fast align time decreases the possibility of an inty trying to manually pilot into you to decloak and/or bump you so they can get a lock.
What I found was that the align time of the Cheetah and the Helios were pretty similar, but the Cheetah had a slightly smaller sig radius, so I went with the Cheetah. The optimal setup seemed to be 1 x Inertia stabs in the low, 2 x Nanofiber in the low, 1 x covert ops cloak in the high, 1 x Small Low Friction Nozzle Joints in the rigs, and 1 x Small Polycarbon Engine Housing in the rigs. With my skills, that meant a 3.0s align time and a 51.1 sig radius. I didn't worry about tank or ECM burst since if I got locked, I was probably dead.
In practice, I took what I found and applied it to my probing Cheetah fit. This meant that I used Gravity Capacitor Rigs instead of the agility rigs with a trade off of .2s to my align time. I also fit a 1mn AB, 2 x webs, and 1 x Warp Disruptor in the mids, but that's not relevant to this specific question. What I can say, though, is that I never got caught by a gate camp when piloting that ship through gate camps. It may not be the perfect setup, but it always worked for me.
For most of the BPO you don't need any skills to research them, except Laboratory Operation for more slots.
However, some more advanced BPO require you to have certain skills, as listed below:
- Research
- Metallurgy
- Electronic Engineering
- Graviton Physics
- Armor Rigging
- Shield Rigging
- Projectile Weapon Rigging
- Launcher Rigging
- Drones Rigging
- Hybrid Weapon Rigging
- Energy Weapon Rigging
- Astronautic Rigging
- Electronics Superiority Rigging
- Energy Grid Rigging
- Mechanical Engineering
- Jury Rigging
- Amarrian Starship Engineering
- Gallentean Starship Engineering
- Caldari Starship Engineering
- Minmatar Starship Engineering
- Rocket Science
Additionally, for T2 BPO:
- Quantum Physics
- Molecular Engineering
- Electromagnetic Physics
- Mechanical Engineering
- Nuclear Physics
- Laser Physics
- Hydromagnetic Physics
- Nanite Engineering
- High Energy Physics
- Graviton Physics
I don't believe you own a T2 BPO, but in case you get your hands on one.
All those skills require different levels for different BPO, but I suggest to use EveMon to look at what level unlocks, so you will know of you gonna need it or not.
I did not take faction items into account. You CAN research them before manufacturing it, but you can only get BPC at the LP Stores anyway.
Best Answer
The skills that affect fitting are:
The rigging skills listed above reduce a CPU or Power Grid penalty when using certain rigs.
You should be aware that CCP has done a lot rebalancing of ships over the years. This means there's lot old fittings out there that will no longer work on current ships even with max skills. Sometimes you'll also find fittings that don't work unless you're using a certain implant that wasn't mentioned a requirement. It's easy to put together a fitting together and publish it somewhere without realizing it depends on some implant you forgot you had plugged in.