Ore and Ice Mining

If you're new to mining, give the Introduction to Mining page a read to get some background knowledge.

Mining is a pretty straightforward activity in Eve, and can be done in almost every area of space. Start by finding an asteroid belt or mining anomaly. Once there, use your survey scanner to see how much ore is in the rocks around you, pick one, activate your mining lasers, and either orbit the rock or soft-align to a citadel. When your ore hold is full, you can empty it as-is into a citadel, or compress the ore using a rorqual, orca, porpoise, or refinery. Note that moon ore can only be compressed in a rorqual or orca.

Gas Harvesting

If you're new to gas harvesting, give the Gas Section of the Introduction to Mining page a read to get some background knowledge.

Gas can be found throughout New Eden, in 2 broad categories split between normal and wormhole space. Gas clouds spawn as Cosmic Signatures, and as such need to be scanned down before they can be accessed. Lowsec gas clouds can be harvested safely, while those found in all wormholes and most areas of nullsec have some risk-generating mechanic. Gas clouds are large objects, and usually only a handful are present per signature. This combined with the short range of your Gas Cloud Scoops means you'll mostly find yourself inside the clouds you're harvesting. Besides all that the idea is pretty much the same as mining. Note that gas can only be compressed by an Industrial Command Ship or Capital Industrial Ship.

Defensive Capabilities

The expedition frigates are based on the venture hull, though have quite a few advantages over it. They have about triple the raw HP as well as a T2 ship resistance profile. They also have the fitting required to use medium ancillary shield boosters, all combined giving a heated repair rate of 250 EHP/s on the Endurance and 126 EHP/s on the Prospect. Most importantly, the Prospect can fit Covert Ops Cloaking Devices, allowing it to warp while cloaked, while the Endurance can use standard cloaks with no velocity penalty.

Offensively both ships lack any ability to do meaningful damage, making evasion these ships' only option for defense.

Mining Yield

The prospect and endurance both receive decent bonuses to ore mining, though the prospect wins out in terms of raw yield. However it may be worth considering that the Endurance only needs a single Miner module to get that yield, nearly cutting the amount of crystals needed to mine any particular amount of ore in half when using Modulated Miner modules. This evaluation assumes max skills, 2 Mining Laser Upgrades, and the maximum possible number of Miner IIs on each ship.