Defense
Between hull and shield blocks, hull blocks have essentially 400 hp per block. However, this only protects if the hull is the part that is hit. Shield blocks are able to protect all round. Hull is easily destroyed by missiles, but missiles don't do very good DPS for shields. Shields are easily defeated by Overdrive and Ion. You'll need a balance of both to survive.
Weapons
You'll need to chose what role your ships wants to play. Taking down a ship is first the shields, then the hull. The problem with a highly specialized role is that you'll need help to do other things. Load your ships with some shield killers, preferably Ion or Overdrive. Then put some things to kill the hull, or go through it. My Favorite is AMC with Pulse and Punch to go straight for the core.
Anti-Fighter weapons and turrets are fairly important. Classic Stop/Pull Beam is powerful, but Beam has a limited range, and long range cannot rapid fire. Passive Explosive will also ignore this. Swarm Missiles will likely work, or not if they target they wrong things as they do. Pulse with the largest range (Beam and Explosive slave) will likely kill any fighter, but they may damage you own turrets, so it's best to have these manually activated and your turrets well shielded. Have all of these and you are protected from pesky bombers and fighters. Maybe.
Power
I design my ships to have redundancy power generators, meaning they are less energy and block efficient at the start of the battle, but they are able to perform well when taking block damage. If you truly believe your ship's shield are invincible, or your power cross will never get hit, be my guest.
Thrust
Thrust is important because it gives you both offensive and defensive capabilities. You can either have a slow heaving ship with massive shields, or have a fast ship with minimal shields. I prefer to have a balance of both for maximum efficiency due to diminishing returns. However, at some point, some ships don't need a good thrust to weight due to the pointlessness of it.I lean towards speed for smaller ships and shields for larger ships due to turning speed, but I try to keep somewhat it balanced.
Offense or Defense?
Honestly, before thinking about this, I thought that having more weapons than an enemy ship would always be better. I though about it, and I realized I never thought this through completely. This is and important thing to consider as weapons scales linearly and shields, hull, and thrusters do not. However, before you make death cubes of power and AMC, consider this: If you do not have shields, you immediately lose to hull eaters and my favorite, AMC with Pulse and Punch. Instant Core Overheat.
If you have shields, you can escape, get help, and turn it around. Shields work well in fleets. If you need to escape, you can to faction home, you can. If you do not have shields, you will immediately lose if you do not get the first strike. If you have hull, you will not die so easily from AMC and Beam weapons at odd angles.
Purely offensive ships should be support. The shield, thrust, and hull ships should be frontline. If the purely defensive ship has low shields, it can take turns with the fleet.
Odds are, fleets aren't organized, you aren't going to get any help. But at least you can have a chance to fight back. With shields, you have, at the very least, a chance to turn things around. First strike is important, but the enemy's first strike becomes less deadly if shields are invested in. So have enough shields so you don't instantly die from ambushes. That's just embarrassing.
Cloaking and Radar Jamming
Cloaking is only good for scouts. It drains way to much power to use it on an attack vessel. You decloak if you even try to attack, so it only really works for burst damage like bombers. A normal, well shielded, and agile bomber will do this better though.
Jamming, on the other hand, is amazing if your ships has the power and mobility. It prevents lock-on missiles from obliterating you, and it prevents the enemy from knowing your exact distance. Beam has a range of 500m and AMC has a range of 1000m. Long range beam has 1000m, and I haven't tested long range AMC. If you are going around your enemy in circles, you can use this to stay behind them the entire time too. People often rely on their compass to help them find the enemy, so this should be fun to annoy them. With overdrive, you'll move faster than they can turn.
New Systems
Sacrifice some of your ship's current shield blocks for Ion. It doesn't make you invincible.
Hull hardening with Punch is very powerful with Hardened Hull. Hull hardening only works with hull.
Explosive passive prevents death by Pull/Stop Beam. Uncommon threat, but very common and lethal if a fighter.
Piercing and EMP Passive are not as useful because they are uncommon threats.
Currently, Push, Pull, and Stop passives are useless. For now at least.
I hope some of this helps!
