Ships Combat ship

hi!
im not sure what ship im going to buy, i got 90 mill and a type-9 ship right now.
i want a ship to go into res and cz and combat mission
 
There are a few very good ships that are just out of your current price range (e.g. Python, FDL, Krait II), but a few others that are within your budget if you absolutely need to buy a combat ship right this instant. Personally, I would recommend waiting until you have around 150M CR and then buying yourself an FDL and equipping it as a shield tank.

That said, if you're looking to buy a combat ship on 90M CR and still have enough for a rebuy, I would recommend going with the FAS or Chieftain. Both ships are very similar to each other, with good maneuverability, OK-ish shields, and a thick hull. The Chieftain is a bit slower than the FAS, but is more maneuverable, has a stronger shield, and has more numerous hardpoints to allow you to experiment with different weapons. Both ships can be bought and outfitted for under 85M CR, which will give you military bulkheads, a boatload of HRPs and MRPs, the biggest bi-weave shield you can fit (you will lose your shield in these ships, you want it to come back as fast as possible), A-rated core internals (except D-rated sensors and life support), and your choice of weapons and utility mounts (provided that you don't go overboard and get all PAs, railguns and shield boosters). If you are concerned about possibly not having enough money for more than 1 rebuy, you can downgrade the bulkheads to reinforced and shave ~10M CR off of your purchase price and 500k CR off of your rebuy at the cost of less than 300 hull (you'll still have over 2200 hull without engineering).
 
I agree with the Vulture suggestion. You can build a fully kitted out one for cheap so you still have some money in the bank. FYI, it has power issues. Is it safe to assume you haven't unlocked engineers yet? Engineers can turn the Vulture from a mean ship into an absolute monster.

Without engineering you'll have to make some sacrifices with the Vulture. I would A rate all the core internals except the sensors and life support. For weapons I would go with 2 large gimballed frag cannons, unless you are good with fixed weapons then take those. I think they are the best bang for the power limits. I personally like bi-weave shields for the fast recharge, especially in CZ and Res sites, you can fully recharge between bouts relatively quickly. Other than that just take hull and module reinforcements for your optional internals so you can take some punishment if your shields go down. You can probably fit one shield booster, maybe 2 but due to the power limits no more than that. Take some chaff and/or point defense for the other utilities.

If you do have engineers unlocked then the world is your oyster. Take whatever you want and blow stuff up (okay, not quite. there will still be power issues but engineering helps this ship a lot)

Good luck Cmdr!

Edit: this is a quick build I put together. Similar to the one below this post with minor differences.
 
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Vulture <20m cr
The Vulture is a very good ship, but it really suffers without engineering. Since OP did not specify which (if any) engineers they have unlocked, I'm going on the assumption that they do not have any of the engineers available since one could forseeably earn enough to buy and outfit a type 9 without unlocking farseer.

Back to the Vulture. Yes, you can fly a Vulture without any engineered modules, but you will be limited by how much power generation you can squeeze out of the size 4 power plant. This means that you effectively cannot use SCBs, nor can you use A-rated or prismatic shields, and you will be forced to choose between the weapons you want or having shield boosters at the cost of being forced to run pulses/multis/cannons. The best way to set up a Vulture without engineering anything involves A-rating the usual core internals (power plant, thrusters, FSD, distro), upgradeing the shield to a size 5 bi-weave, filling the rest of the optional internals with HRPs and MRPs as a base. From there, you make your choice of weapons (pulses, bursts, beams, multis, cannons and frags are all good choices, although beams and cannons are kinda iffy) add at least 1 chaff launcher and check to see how much power you have left. For every 1.2 MJ of power that you have available, you can add a single A-rated shield booster. If you don't have enough power to mount a shield booster, you can go with your choice of point defence(s), additional chaff launcher(s), heatsink launcher(s), or kill-warrant scanner.

Something like https://s.orbis.zone/45gk would be a fairly good Vulture build without engineers. It has a burst laser for taking out shields (which it can run for over 7 minutes with 3 pips to weapons) and a frag cannon for shredding hull, both gimballed. It gets a pair of chaff launchers so it can continuously drop chaff (the first launcher will come off of cooldown when the 2nd one finishes) a heatsink launcher, and a KWS to collect larger bounties so you earn money faster. The 300 MJ bi-weave shield is backed up with 1600 hull and 175 module reinforcement, which should be more than enough to survive long enough to run out of ammo for the frag cannon. In total, the build comes to 22.5M CR

Edit: If you have engineers maxed-out, you can build a Vulture that looks like https://s.orbis.zone/45gq, https://s.orbis.zone/45gr, or https://s.orbis.zone/45gs. I haven't updated the builds in a while, but the gist is that you end up with a bi-weave shield tank with SCBs that can mount your choice of troll PvP weapon.
 
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You can use A rated shields on an unengineered Vulture, but it takes some finagling and some serious power management. If you are willing to fight with life support turned off, you can squeeze a little bit more out of it than you might expect. 30 minutes is a long time.
 
As said above, an engineered vulture is king.

Before I got mine I spent a lot of combat time in a lightly engineered Viper mk IV.

Now the vulture (and sometimes fdl) are my go to ships, but some of my fondest combat memories where in my old Viper 4 with pure multicannon build.

Get thrusters to dirty drives 3 and it’ll do some insane manouvering (not pitching unless you practise FA/off). But the lateral thrusters are insane and fun.

With a decent shield and lots of modulespace for hull reinforcement, it’ll tank and tank.
And it’s pretty inexpensive. Think of it as a tankier cobra 3
 
Vulture is nice, but if you feel like spending money I'd go with the A-rated Federal Assault Ship which is~90-100mil. Heck, you could go to Li-Yong space and buy the ship and everything with 20% rebate., remember that.
FAS is basically a larger brother of the Vulture. She's tanky and dances like a ballerina. A proper combat ship.
 
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