The Llama's actually a nicely balanced ship. It could take you a long way on just cargo runs before you ever got into anything else, and with good armor and shields, you could do worse for a fighter. For an interceptor, I'm not so sure...
One thing to note: While the stock Llama offers two medium as well as two light mounts, the one you start with has all four light. Your choice of weapons is limited, and not just in firepower.
Meanwhile, you want to be careful about whom you go hunting. There's a whole web of interfactional relationships that affect your reputation when you start blowing people up. The Rlaan are on good terms with several factions, so killing them is just one good way to make more than a few enemies. This is especially true early on. With your reputation generally near zero (neutral) then, a few bad marks will do a lot more damage to it than they would to a highly positive one.
Your best bet, early on, is to limit your hunting to pirates and Luddites. Almost
nobody likes either of them, although you have to watch out for the Uln. Everyone else will grow to
love you for your service, but the Uln, who seem to like just about everyone, will get upset (more over pirates than Luddites, I think. Go fig).
Your best bet is
not to just shoot back at the Uln. Most everyone else seems to like them a little, too, so killing them is likely to hurt your reputation across the board. Instead, you'll probably want to sweet-talk them out of fighting when they start to attack. Use F1 to send suitably congenial messages (mostly). Again, this is more important early on. Later, when just about everyone seems to love you, a few Uln shot in self-defense will be more easily forgiven for all the pirates you dispatch. The only problem is, you'll eventually have the Uln attacking you on sight, and at least in my experience, those suckers are EVERYWHERE!
One way you might save yourself a lot of Uln trouble is to sweet-talk them, a LOT, at EVERY opportunity, before you ever get seriously into shooting. Again, a highly positive rep is more easily recovered than a negative one, but it takes a LOT of talking to redeem a little killing (who'da thunk?). It might not really be worth it, but if you can keep the little blockheads from constanty coming at you... who knows?
Things with the Uln would be a lot easier if there were
some faction they disliked. I came to realize something awhile back, though: The kind of trouble this interfactional mess stirs up may seem completely insane, even ridiculous... but I'm not sure it's that far from what we see here on Earth today.
