Like others I also have been up to a Clipper before getting horrified by the running costs and coming back to an Asp. It's a great all rounder and is certainly my favourite so far - let's see what the two new ships in 1.2 have to offer!
For weapons load-out I was using the two medium beams (the 0.5 million gimballed ones) and 4 small gimballed multi-cannons. Yesterday I tried a new layout of the 4 small gimballed beams and two medium rail-guns. It might take a little longer to strip the shields but it is
SO satisfying to see the hull damage on a Python etc from the rail-guns. The challenge here is that for small ships the rail-guns are hard to target but so far I've found that anything small is no match for the 4 beam lasers anyway, so I only need the rail-guns for the big bad guys.
Word of warning - even with fully rated power unit it is close to the wire on power consumption, so I had to down grade something to ensure that I didn't have systems powering down in flight, I chose the Kill Warrant Scanner. I could have tried playing with module power priority I know but I'm ok with it for now.