Thanks for explaining this to me. I guess you could say my current combat Aliance Chieftain is hull tank, but I try to balance hull with sheild, so I guess I should stop doing that
I never played Chieftain but I think it should be made as hull tank. So fill it up with 4x hull reinforcements, add 2x module reinforcements (engineered for heavy duty or maybe thermal resistant), bi-wave shields (with fast recharge), 2 shield boosters, heat sinks or maybe a single chaff, reactive armour, armoured power plant. As for weapons I would put plasmas in all slots (efficient). People usually use dispersal field and target lock breaker on them. If you want you might pick something kinetic for the small slots, prefferably multi-cannons or rails (long range for sniping when enemy is far away). You might also consider changing effective plasmas into focused, as with higher projectile speed it's easier to hit, but you will have severe temperature problems, so it's a matter of experimenting. That is basically it. Even though it's a hull tank you should have pretty good boost speeds (with dirty drives), so you can try to hit and go with your plasmas, and recharge shields away from enemy, when they are down. It's a solid build for 1v1 encounters.
Balancing it with shields doesn't make much sense. To use shields effectively you would need a lot of boosters and a strong shield cell bank. Not really worth it. It's better to have soft shields, which can recharge quickly while you are away and have them ready for the next pass. You also have to know, that when you are fighting a shield tank you shouldn't give up too early. They will use their cell banks to rebuild the shields, while you will lose your armour. You just have to keep on fighting. It might turn out that when you are 20% hull left, he will finally run out of cells, his shields go down, and without them he is practically dead. You can also try to ram them. It's a good strategy with hull tanks. So generally during most of the fight you might be thinking that you are losing, because you are 50% hull and he is still 100% hull with full shields, but that might not be the case at all. Also remember that any time you are taking fire you should have 4 pips in the shields (if they are up). So generally I would charge my weapons when away from the enemy, change to systems when closing in, and immediately change to engines after the pass, so I can turn quickly, and put it back to weapons again. Pips management is really crucial in PvP.