what about the ship? and crews?
Doesn't really matter, the only crew that gives actual ship bonuses currently is Paige and that's purely to decrease travel time between planets. You technically only "
need" as many crew as it takes to service weapons with the Turret flag, everyone else is for either in ship shops, getting stat boosts, or purely for smut.
If you want to have every acquirable crew on your ship at the same time (technically not possible as there is at least 1 instance of mutual exclusion), you need to have the Clidesdale K7 as not even 2nd place in terms of crew/module capacity can fit everyone with every upgrade thrown into crew quarters (21 possible crew that take space with 7 more planned, the Sidewinder can fit 20 with every upgrade being crew quarters while the K7 can fit 30 so is good even up to the planned crew count). Otherwise any ship really works even the starting one, though IMHO The Gruss and LEK are both pretty bad buys to use if not just to collect. The Sidewinder is technically the best in game in terms of its combination of stats and capacities with Blade coming in close behind it, but the Sledgehammer and MSXI from Myrellion are perfectly serviceable as your "end game" ship as well.
As for what the other guy said about weapons; it generally doesn't matter as long as you take into account damage types. Electric is good against shield but bad against armor, Kinetic is good against armor but bad against shield, and Burning does the same damage against both. In terms of raw stats; MGs are the most damage per power efficient at 15.2 and 16 damage/power for the turret and mounted version respectively, with missiles coming behind them at 12 for both, the Thermal Cannon at 8.2, Coil Cannon at 7.1, EM at 6.5 for both, then the Lasers coming in last with 5.8 for both. You will never have enough energy to realistically fire every weapon on any of the ships you use turn after turn (unless you go crazy with putting every upgrade into the Power Tuner, at best you'll be energy neutral with 2 mediocre weapons or just 1 good weapon), so being energy efficient is generally better than pure damage potential. The Meta is basically 1 EM Turret then put Missile Turrets in the rest of your mounts as Missiles deal half and half of Kinetic and Burn damage so are good against armor but not useless against shields like other Kinetic weapons.
HOWEVER, keep in mind that this also doesn't take in account the couple enemy ships that carry damage reducing upgrades for shields or armor (IIRC the only ones at the moment being Teyaal and Star Viper), which absolutely guts weapons like the MGs and Missiles that do high number of shots but low damage each shot. Teyaal specifically is geared as a direct counter to MG spam while Viper is geared as a counter against Missile spam. Against them your best loadout would probably be EM turret then either pair the Coil Cannon with the Thermal Cannon or pair a couple Laser Turrets together.
