I can't seem to hit anything. I've only played the two missions after the basic training. Of course since I have wingmen I won them, but I only had 3% hits with my primary weapon.
I'm trying to aim ahead like it tells you to, but still miss most of the time. I'm using a £30 Saitek joystick, which obviously isn't the best available but was recommended in reviews when I got it a few years ago.
Any tips to improve my woeful performance?

Practice is about the only solution I'm afarid. I went pretty damned badly to begin with but soon got the hang of it. Try getting closer to a target before firing, that'll improve your chances of a hit

A good way to get some practise -- go into the tech room, click "Mission Simulator" and "Single Missions." Down at the bottom of the list, there's Terran, Vasudan, and Shivan gauntlet missions. These are practise runs versus increasingly difficult waves of enemy fighters. IIRC, they start out pretty easy, and it'll let you work on dogfighting without having to worry about mission objectives.

Excellent, I had a quick look for something like this but couldn't find it. I remembered Tie Fighter had an historical mission a bit like that, but that was a long time ago, and I seem to be very rusty. Will look into this tomorrow.
Thanks,
Richard

As said before here Practice is the best way. And BTW i to am using a $30 saitek and it does me fine.

If your getting poor framerates this would also make the game very difficult to play. If you have the freespace 2 game from here setup the Freespace Open Project and install the fsport mod (a freespace 1 campaign port to the FS2 engine). I did that and it looks light years ahead.

I'm thinking about getting the second and trying the open version. For the moment, I am using the glide wrapper mentioned in another post. The appearance suffers slightly, but so far so good as far as the frame rate is concerned. The frustrating thing about the frame rate problems is that they built over time, so it wasn't until about ten minutes playing that the problem was noticeable and then maybe another ten minutes before it became unbearable. I'm pretty much certain glide emulation has sorted this for me now.
I've yet to complete a gauntlet mission, but I think I'm getting better. I managed to get to the fifth wave in six minutes last time, although I suspect that was a bit of a fluke. My main problem now is getting enough hits in to bring down the enemy's shields and do some decent damage before they regenerate.

I've never completed a gauntlet either. It's more a case of "cry in the dojo, laugh on the battlefield."

on the weekend some friends of mine completed the vasuden gauntlet. But i haven't done it solo yet.
As for getting the sheilds down. I would mount something like the Circe or Prometheus (Standard) and then mount a maxim. If you want to make your life super easy though. Fly the eryines and mount 2 kaysers :D.

I've come close to finishing the vasudan gauntlet. Got the big destroyer in wave 5 completely disarmed (destroyed weapons subsystem and all turrets) and down to about 28% hull. Then I got wasted by one of the fighters >_<
I was flying an Apollo, mounting 2 avengers, MX-50s, and hornets.
Freespace 1. No such weapons, no such fighter :)
But yes, weapon choice makes a difference. For practise though, I'd mount avengers, as that's the minimum you need to actually punch through shields (ML-16s don't cut it), and during the campaign you won't always have the luxury of being able to mount the biggest death-ray available.

Ahh yes i fogot he was talking about FS1. In that case i personally prefer the perseus with some good ole prometheus's. For taking down capital ships nothing beats medium to heavy bombers.
Personally i would prefer to be able to mount beam cannons on my fighter but that would just look silly :D

Thanks everyone for your advice. I went back into the campaign today, and I completed all the primary and secondary objectives of the next mission (A Small Deadly Cargo, only the third "proper" mission) with 56% primary weapon hits, and 60% secondary. A vast improvement on before I tried the gauntlet etc.

The Saitek joysticks are quite frankly HORRIBLE in my opinion for playing Freespace. I have a Cybprg Evo and the center is so stiff that it makes minute adjustments almost impossible, you end up "lurching" everywhere even when you try and be as gentle as possible.
For me nothing has ever come close to the Microsoft Sidewinder 3D Pro in terms of "feel"...

I actually decided to buy a new joystick as well. I didn't want to spend much, so I got a Speedlink Black Widow, which has actually made a massive difference with this game. With the Saitek joystick (ST200) it was like you say, it was basically not possible to make slight adjustments because the joystick felt like it was getting stuck.
The black widow is taking a bit of getting used to, especially the way it feels when you cross the centre of either axis, but it's a vast improvement for me over the old one.