DNYI here,
Personally, I go for a bounty hunting loadout which generally consists of the highest rated and highest class shields available for a given ship as top priority. Depending on number of utility mounts, I typically employ a kill warrant scanner, and depending on number of mounts remaining and size of ship, a chaff launcher for smaller ships and ships with weaker shields, and A rated shield boosters. Seeing as maneuverability is very import in a fight, I also rank having the highest rated and highest class thrusters as a top priority. From my experience in reaching the Dangerous combat rating, the better the thrusters the better your pitch rate can become which will help with keeping the target in your sights, although knowing when to shift from the forward throttle blue sweet spot to the reverse throttle blue sweet spot will also help with keeping the enemy in your sights. As for weapons, I try to use an all pulse laser setup provided that all the weapon mounts are at least class 2 or above. Other peoples tests have shown that pulse lasers currently give the most shield damage per capacitor charge used and are thus able to have all weapons firing longer before hitting the point where fire rate is determined by recharge rate of the power distributor. On that note for a combat setup, always go with the best power distributor that can be fitted as it will give the greatest impact on how your offensive and defensive systems function. For most ships it is not necessary to use turret mounted weapons as your main offensive weapon. Turreted weapons may be of use if your ship has mixed class weapon mounts, your ship is not very agile (i.e. Cargo ships, the Anaconda, or the federal dropship), or you are expecting to be constantly engaged by multiple opponents (such as in a warzone, but using turrets in fire at will mode here may actually get you more attention from a greater number of enemy ships than you want). For player versus NPC fighting, an all gimbaled weapons build can easily serve you well as they are good at targeting subsystems without having to have the best flying skills. If you have extra mounts, especially mixed class mounts, it can be advantageous to use fixed mount weapons on the lower class hardpoints as this will give you the ability to ignore chaff effects with some of your weapons. Again, although other lasers may show higher damage and dps than pulse lasers, pulse lasers can fire at maximum fire rate for longer and decrease in fire rate the least compared to other lasers. Beam lasers do not deal good damage when they are constantly cycling on/off after they have depleted the stored weapons energy.
After fitting the best shields, thrusters, power distributor, and shield boosters, if you are not yet above 105% power usage when deployed, you can fit some shield cell banks. Depending on your playstyle, I find it better to go with shield cell banks that have at least 4 charges as this will give you the ability to fight for a longer period. Mounting multiple shield cell banks is a valid option even if you do not have power capacity for it as shield cell banks can toggled on/off on the systems panel. Be aware that triggering a shield cell will cause all shield cell banks that are powered ON to be used at the same time. If you have multiple banks power ON at the same time, you can get a larger recharge to your shields at the cost of using more charges. You can also keep all but one bank powered OFF to allow you to use less power and then cycle to another bank when the current powered bank is out of charges. This will let you increase the total number of charges you can use.
For all builds it is important to do good power management in the systems tab. This means toggling off or setting to priority 5 any subsystem you are not going to use at all in battle (i.e. cargo scoop unless pirating) and setting appropriate priority settings on the remaining systems. I prefer to have all weapon, shields, and offensive/defensive systems set to priority 1. Additionally, set thrusters to priority 1 as you never want to be unable to move. I leave sensors at priority 2 as they are not critical to running away. Life support and FSD can be set to priority 3 or 4. As long as you are confident you will not lose shields and possible lose the canopy, you can fight with life support off as long as your battle does not last longer than your emergency air supply. Thus if you are really constrained for power, setting life support to 3 or 4 will allow it to be toggled off when your weapon hardpoints are deployed. As soon as your hardpoints are retracted life support will then come back on. Seeing as you can not use your FSD to jump to super cruise or hyperspace while your hardpoints are deployed, it is perfectly fine to allow it to be turned off to save power while hardpoints are deployed.
