To be fair, I may have been turning around at the time and pointing partly at the gate anyway.

My real issue was that the 'Incoming Transmisison' prompt came up and I held E to confirm. But it was also prompting a gate jump invisibly because of my proximity to the gate. When the confirmation finished it then processed both actions - I got just a snippet of conversation and then warped off.

That's what happened to me. Went through a gate by mistake and never got the transmission prompt again. Still, the devs were pretty quick in fixing the savegame for me.

After going through the main story, I can't help but feel the game is a little bit rushed. It's rather short. Oh well, hopefully there will be some a patch of sorts that expands on the ending and maybe adds a little extra.

Naturally, having just hit a 'oh, you need to restart' bug I haven't finished yet. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if it's a fairly short feeling game though. The dev team is only two people after all. But for $20, even if I was halfway through the store where I got stuck that's still not a bad value for a single player game time-wise.

If I have a complaint, it's more that the game seems shallow. I was really hoping for the broadside/turret system to expand into interesting fitting decisions. But when you boil it down the difference between most turrets is a slight modification of stats.

To give an example of what I was hoping for:
Projectiles vs. Beams - because of the Deflector mechanics Beams present an interesting tradeoff in gameplay. They have impressive stats but you can very easily cut their effectiveness to zero if you're constantly flicking the Deflector on/off. Using beams against fighters is another almost interesting tradeoff. Beams have a much easier time hitting fast targets. Now, I was kind of expecting that beams would trade that accuracy for DPS with the fact you'd have to 'reload' the beam far more often when shooting small targets like that. Never seemed to be the case though.

But beyond small selection of highly specialized items like EMP Flak and Leech missiles there aren't really many choices to be made in fitting out your ship. But hey, with luck we see a sequel that expands on the good parts of this one. :)

Yeah, beams are crazy good against pretty much everything. If beams don't solve your problems, the heatseeking missiles will. A full broadside of beams against a dreadnought (provided you're also in a dreadnought or equivalent) can easily strip the shield facing and punch a hole through the hull in one salvo, two at the most.

Still, I was expecting a little bit more from the game. It's not bad but it can be so much better, and would be, if you weren't stuck to the horisontal axis.

Nothing really wrong with that.
In fact, from the look of things, they did that on purpose so this could be sold on consoles too.

If that's the case, this is one of the VERY few games where the devs did a good job for both pc and console.

It's the Broadside Combat that only really works when stuck on that Plane.
I won't lie - I almost didn't buy it, because of that one Limitation.

The Fact that you could in Freelancer and never really needed to other than for Dogfights is what made me buy it either Way. Because here, you don't Dogfight, since you're not in a Fighter. Since other Capital Ships stick all to the same Plane, it ain't a Problem. The Fighters are really only in there for added - wait for it - DEPTH.
... yeah, I feel bad now. Ah who am I kiddin', I don't.

No idea if anybody else dropped the game for a while because of a this, but I just came back and loaded up my old save just out of idle curiosity and was greeted with a progression fix and am now back on track.

No idea what patched fixed it, but I'm happy it happened.