elghinnfaer: I think it would have been more fitting to have the craft controls respond more like a VTOL plane then this (Launch up and few yards and lurch forward uncontrollably stuff) The concept of the game was awesome, the delivery and end product was sloppy and not well thought out.
...actually, the way they've done this is that the flitter-ships and scout planes have a hover-type navigation in there already. So you have a 10-20 degree tilt before starting to adjust the height up or down when on normal pulse. Then on boost, the angle decreases. For fighter ships, this hover-angle is much smaller. And the cargo ships almost don't have it at all. "Look around you" angle on the scout ships also is a lot wider than in the cargo and fighter ships.
Which.. sort of makes sense.
It would make more sense if the number of slots wasn't tied to the exorbitant costs of the ships. So you maybe had generally more slots on the cargo and drop-ships, and fewer in general on the scout ships. But who knows where that entire "increasingly steeper grinding goals" thing came from. *cough* Sony*cough*
sirdrak: One of the problems fixed in the next patch 1.07 will be just this one... Take a look at this (from 1.07 changelog):
Fixed an issue that would cause your ship to be thrown in the sky at high speed when taking off (in rare cases could in turn lead to getting stuck). ..this fix seems to be included in the experimental build available in the "beta-channels" from August 22nd.
(But if you install the experimental branch, remember to mark support requests with 3xperimental, and so on. Helps support out a bit).