Yeah, controls seem to be the pitfall of this. Very soon I've realized the way to go is to circle-strafe, unfortunately the game doesn't seem able to recognize more than two simultaneous keystrokes, so I can't maneuver properly. What this needs is proper twin analog stick gamepad control.
Edit: Also, there's no safe haven to retreat to. Often I stop to reconfigure my ship and some jackass comes around and blows me up. I'd say a game based on the gimmick of building your own ship damn well ought to let you do that.

I went ahead and bought the damn game.

Captain what?!?

Captain cavern.

hm, this game is sucking up my time at work now. It takes a little bit to get into, just have to know how to place your engines to make your ship actually able to fly. I keep getting my guns shot off though, after which i have to trick the other ships into blowing each other up to get spare gun parts. anyway, here's what my ship looks like now after multiple near deaths.
http://i49.tinypic.com/2r5asle.jpg
bleh came out way too blurry... will have to redo

Yeah, same here. I've been wasting nearly as much time on this as on Qwop lately. It has a lot of flaws, but the basic concept is really solid and fun. I wish there were more things to do, though, and some safe zones where you could retreat to in order to rebuild your ship.
And I know what you mean about the spare parts - what bothers me a lot is that enemies only drop parts when you blow up the core, if you destroy a supporting part, anything that was attached to it is destroyed as well. A lot of enemies are built as a thin line with guns positioned on either side and the core in the middle. Trying to destroy the core I usually blow the arms off first, leaving me with few to no usable parts and usually a net loss in terms of my vessel's power.
A question to those who have bought this - does the other game that you get access to once you shell out some cash fix any of these things? Or is it just more of the same? If it has significant improvements, I might be persuaded to buy it as well, since as I said the basic concept is incredibly addictive.

Farbs has a lot of sequels planned I think. You're basically paying for all of them at a cheaper price than in the future, if you buy it now. I heard the 2nd game in the series, ie. the one just released, has a lot of new modules. From screenshot, seems the gameplay is slightly different too, though I'm not sure how.

Well, I got pretty far color wise, I was taking down cyan colored big ass ships, but then i got bored. Great time waster though, this is what my ship was looking like near the end (i did get a couple more blue guns)

I've gotten to the point past white blocks, where the blocks are these strange X's that change color without taking damage

The Kilo stuff (the rainbow X's) is the best you can get in Captain Forever. Unfortunately, unlike everything else (Alpha to Juliet), it's hard to tell structural integrity at a glance. You probably won't need to worry about it for the most part, though, since it's so damn overpowered that you'll probably dominate anything that comes your way if you pilot your ship right.
Oh, and when you get to the part where there are trigger-happy Kilo ships EVERYWHERE, and one of their command modules blows, you'd better snag the leftover Kilo parts FAST because they won't be very common afterward (you'll instead have ships of all the levels hell-bent on murdering you, and tend to find more India and Juliet ships than Kilo ones).
Once the ships start getting huge and practically made of guns, though (somewhere between Delta and Echo), your best bet is not to engage them directly, but to trick two strong ships into shooting each other up with careful maneuvering. If you're lucky, you can get one to blow the other's command module without having to destroy everything else in the process.

that is my typical strategy.
LOL
something happened.
additional edit:
http://vcd.phuce.com/
that's the place for people who purchased the game to play with different ships