Man, I am so out of touch with this game... Someone mentioned having agents research BPOs for you... how exactly do you do that? Will my Amarr standings help?
What is a cheap, effective, small fleet PVP setup? What roles are there and what ships are good in those roles? I know that tackling is one of those roles, but I don't know if that is warp scrabling, webbing, AND tracker disruption or just two out of three.
1: you present yourself, with research skills to an agent with the relevant research type, and wait a while. Research datacores will accumulate. You'll have periodic missions available to increase the rate. Datacores get used to make t2 goodies.
2: Yes they will. They'll let you use better research agents. That's only half of it though, you still need research skills.
3: there's far too many to list, varying by context and opposition.
3a: Here's recent footage of some high-end competition pvp.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdhQ9ODLwi - the commentator who's completely freaking out is from the team flying the caldari (blue) ships.
4: basic roles are tackle, ewar, dps, and logistics. Scouting is also often useful in 'cross-country' type engagements, chasing between safespots and the like, and every reasonably sized fleet will want to have a ship with ganglinks.
4.1: Tackle will just about always be frigates. Each race has a purpose-designed one - Amarr use the executioner and its t2 variants. You'll fit speed mods, a web, a scram, and a mwd, close as fast as you can, and make the enemy ships hold still. The SECOND most important thing to have in a fleet.
4.2:Ewar/scouting: relatively fragile ships, most of the time, these stay clear of the engagement proper while applying debuffs from long range or scanning out safespots to which the enemy is attempting to flee. This is something that requires a lot more coordination to work out properly, as ewar not tuned to racial weaknesses is failure-prone. This is more often an auxilliary role.
4.3:DPS: THE MOST IMPORTANT THING. Get a ship. Put guns on it. Blow the living daylights out of 'em. Simple. Straightforward. Still takes some attention, especially if you don't have anyone flying...
4.4:logistics/command: a support craft, possibly fitting remote repairers or energy transfer arrays to keep other ships alive. This category also may include battlecruiser class ships with one or more gang-warfare bonus links that provide bonuses for all fleet members.