Basic Mining Survival Tips: see bio of Captain JeanLuke Picard Keep an eye on 40+ in local chat window, compact and underlay behind your main chat windows thusly: http://i.imgur.com/yPr7Q04.png The top pirateering and high sec suicide ganking corps are CODE. and Goonswarm Federation, mark them as terrible standing so that you know when 95% of gankers enter your system in local.
Schools of thought on antiganking: 1. Tank up with a procurer or skiff 50k to 200khp, and use ecms to protect retrievers and covetors in your system. 2. Prevent ganks by defending the ice belt with a griffin, arty thrasher, tornado, osprey, etc. 3. Covert antiganking: get into a covert ops cloak capable ship stacked with ecms such as astero, nemisis, or falcon and use noob miners as your bait. 4. Knowledge is power: drop a mobile depot in front of a major trade hub and title it "MINING SURVIVAL TIPS, read bio of xxx". A bit of basic knowledge helps some people to avoid costly and needless tragedy before they learn the hard way, and preventing many ganks is another form of victory, imagine if 100 miners did this around Eve. Start a secret mining channel/fleet of trusted miners in your system or region, comb through gank victims on zkillboards in your area, teach and invite them to your group, to alert and organize against incomming gank fleets, set traps, etc...Ironically the most effective strategy may also produce the least excitement in High sec; if only noob miner's knew the basics. 5. Who cares, this is just the way the game is designed and always will be gankers and noob afk miners autopilot hauler and such, nothing anyone can meaningfully do about it except defend yourself.
Venture t1 Tackle/miner:the key deterrent is to fit afterburner and orbit a roid at 5km or so , often called speed tanking, few pirates will attempt to gank, bump, land on grid, or otherwise harrass a miner performing this simple action. Can fit a 10mn afterburner to proc or skiff.
Procurer t1 70khp+ "Mining Permit": this permit lasts forever even with basic insurance, but in the rare event you are ganked, drop a Mobile Tractor Unit before your ship blows which will scoop up all the many foolhardy gankster wreck loots(1-5mil each, gankers don't insurance payouts on their ships) including your ore and it should last until you get back to collect before someone blows it up. Also Mine like a boss to be reckoned with; drop a Mobile Depot (invulnerable) to refit for any contingencies, orbit it while you mine with an afterburner on to prevent bumping and direct warp ins onto your gridz by enemy fleets, it's like saying "CLAIMED!!!" to pirates and miners in the area.
Retriever 16k-25khp hull tanked: afk miner of choice in high sec, made even better if you only pretend to mine afk, rig hull tanking will deter most any solo gank pirate in hi-sec .7 or above, even with reinforced bulkheads swapped out for 2 ice mining upgrades it still has over 16khp, with some ecm skills it could potentially survive 2-5 wannabe pirates, and ecm prevent the gank of a gimp fit covetor or such; Kill: Malbona Pomon (Catalyst)
Ice Mongering: with Higgs rigging, align and move at 20m/s while "strafe mining" for instant warp away scott free when ganksters land on grid or as soon as they enter system, also slightly less (-3sec) standard align time, use ecms to screw up ganks, just stay alert and don't get bumped out of alignment.
Astero Antiganker: great little ship for ambushing 1 maybe 3 catalyst ganksters after they haved aggressed on a covetor or such, less than 6 second from decloak to jam at an easy to train skill level, covert anti-ganking puts fear into pirates, fight fire with fire, now they have to track down your generic named "skiff" to make sure you aren't cloaked and guarding their next victim, or cloak up and go afk for hours while they wait for you to log off for fear of not knowing which 3 possible retrievers you are guarding.