For what it's worth, until you know what you're doing I would follow the general advice of:
* Avoid beam weapons, Alpha strike is what kills ships, not DPS beams
* Avoid high tech ships, they cost way too much to use when you're first starting out, have poor armor so when you make a mistake and overload you'll have a huge repair bill
* Get a Hegemony commission so you can get their ships
* Play on easy if you can (I don't think you can in Nexerlin)
* Buy an Enforcer (not the D), put on Augmented Engines, 4 annihilator rockets, 2 maulers, 2 flak cannons, 1 light needler, fill the rest with heat sinks. Use the missiles as your group 1, set everything else to auto fire
* Don't use the wolf as a starting ship, use the scarab
All the above advice goes out the window once you get the hang of things, but I personally was terribad at SS probably way longer than I should have been. The above is what saved me.