I havent played  Starpoint Gemini games at all, but what you descrive looks like  a good mechanic actually. Maybe the problem is that your starter ship is total crap, and turns slow as a big fat freighter. Imagine the ship did actually follow tight your mouse pointer, but at the slow turning speed it has. You would struggle frenetically with your mouse  "sliding" it over and over again as your turtle ship slowly turns. It would be an horrible way to  pilot a capship, like it is in X2-3 games.   With the mechanic you descrive you just point were to go and the ship turns there.  If the ship doesnt have turrets and relays on frontal firing guns, then  it sucks for dogfighting unless the target  ship sucks too.

I would say just wait for what the game has to offer, it surely will become better as you upgrade or get  a better ship.

Sound like some sort of lag/performance issue, are you playing on a laptop? and have you tried turning of some of the graphic options just to see if it improves it? and has the game been updated?.

Your ship speed also has something to do with your turning speed and other people mentioned you could just have a crappy ship and if your just starting out you do. When your engaging and the enemy ship is moving try bringing your ship speed down to a lower speed or even stop and let me know if this addresses your issue. The flight mechanics do take a bit to master in SPG1&2 but once you know what to expect you will be good at combat in that game.

Do remember as your ships get bigger these hulks are bit tougher to control but practice will help. Remember to turn that hud on for your shields and use your directional shields to take abuse while you regen a section so you stay in the fight longer.

This could also be a hardware or settings issue that Pinback described but I doubt it because I don't see SPG2 as a huge beast of a game unless you are running it on something under powered?

It seems to me that you try to play it like a space shooter, when actually SPG2 is more like a tactical game where you are flying big ships equipped with turrets. You don't need to face a target directly to attack it, you manoeuvre around it while your turrets fire at it.

Try to switch to turret camera, you can still steer your ship whith the keyboard while firing at your target. What's important is maintaining the right distance, depending on what type of weapon you are using, and managing your shields -you have 4 shields facing forward, backrward, and sides. When one get too much damaged you manoeuvre to expose another. You can also order you turrets to automatically fire at any hostile target or a designated target, it's a great help.

Yes Slay, I have figured this much. Very disappointed TBH, my bad for not realising what this game was. It is ultra boring imo. If you can't engage yourself in fighting enemies, then where is the actual gameplay? Sitting there twisting the ship around so your turrets still have a view whilst the ship auto-fires for you is not gameplay. It's such a waste TBH given the work done for all the pretty graphics. There is no skill whatsoever involved in flying and it seems just one huge repetitive dirge of approaching an enemy, grappling it, shooting it, boarding, capturing and towing it back to a station. Gameplay boils down to pressing a button to grapple, pressing F to auto-fire, pressing a button to board and that's about it, just sit there until the whole thing is over. No interaction, no skill, nothing to immerse yourself in the game. Just don't get it. Tell me there will me more to this as the game goes on.

Sound like a completely different game to the one I was playing but every one has there own preferences I know I have played few games which had been raved about but have left me totally cold.