I played this when it was first released and quite fancy getting back into it for a bit of exploration and hopefully improve my fighting skills!
I've just got the base game with none of the add-ons but i have a Cobra and about 10m in the bank - can anyone recommend me a decent(ish) dogfighting ship with some load-out recommendations?
You really should consider getting the Horizons expansion, it usually pops up on sale somewhere nearly every other week. It is pretty much essential if you plan on making combat easier as without it you cannot engineer your ships. I consider it to be a must buy regardless just because of the planetary landing aspect, it massively extends to exploration part of the game.
And yeah, with conflict zones, I only felt safe once I had an engineered Python. Anything smaller and it could go from ok to oh ****! in seconds. Stick with the Cobra and A rate it and stay is res zones. Since there is no loss of credits by selling a weapon you can try different loadouts with no issues. What you want is a mix of thermal weapons to take down the shields, and kinetic to take out the hull. So beams, burst or pulse lasers for the shields, and good old multicannons for the hull. And go for a bi-weave shield instead of normal, as these tend to recharge quicker which is what you want when getting into fights, as you can always break off and run before they go down fully, such that they can recharge. Then once you get in to it you will then probably want to engineer things and thus need to get Horizons.
got about 70 million worth of data to collect before I reach Elite 
