Basically (it's in another thread) i'm going to stop ranking for a little bit to get my research up and (hopefully!) get some ship-bot's, rescued prisoners, x charge cells and brackets ....Anyway people have told me that I should just start hacking instead...and being a pvp/npcing kinda guy, I don't really know what I should get with my blue badges...(bearing in mind that i'm not going to equip them for a LONG time since space could be going on extra plating's or something instead.) :

Merry christmas btw everyone!

From Dread

go for the cipherbots first...

make sure to equip the bots and quads while you're hacking... after you're ready to move onto something else, you can unequip the bots and quads if you wish, if you really need the space...

Think about it 45 cloak +7% is NEARLY the 50 hacking stats you get from a DQF, plus the 7% applies to ALL scan and cloak for hacking.
A Sub-Dimensional Sensor - Mark III has a better stat:space ratio than a DQF, and a Quantum Jammer - Mark III has a better ratio too. It's not really worth even installing the DQFs unless you don't have anything else to put there.

or unless you only have the space for them, and not the bigger but more size efficient modules...

I'm in the minority on this, from what I hear; but I like to get the Counter-Intelligence Nexi. Especially for folks not super far down on the research tree, it's hard to find decently efficient sources of cloak for your planets. These help.

yes you're in the minority...

...at the very least purchase your 3 cipherbots and 4 decryption quads before buying anything else... when you get in the higher ranks it becomes harder and harder to get badges...

you don't have to equip them if you don't want to... they'll only take up a total of 1 cargo space per module if you never equip them...

ive got all 4 quad frames, and all 3 cypher bots, they help out a ton - for me anyway. if your a PVP/PVNPCer the quadframes are kinda nice as they help out your chance of critical hits / defense of critical hits, cypher bots are more for hacking than anything else.
If you really care about how much research you get then yes get teh cypher bots, if not, then id go for teh quadframes first, thats what I did.

I think having quad-frames installed is more about showing off than anything else. Eventually, 100 cloak and 100 scan isn't much. I have all 4 quad-frames and had them installed. However, I recently power-leveled through missions that gave me more than 200 decks worth of modules, so I had to uninstall a lot to make room for them. And now I'm at a point where no more rank points go into decks. They're all going into engineers and tac officers now.

Thanks for this, I had to uninstall all 4 quad-frames, was wondering about that decision.