I'm not sure this has been mentioned before: I have the linux client and I'm using a logitech wingman interceptor. As compared to the mouse, the stick is much slower. The mouse control has the FPS feeling (unrealistic, I'd say). Movement of the mouse is followed "instantaneously" by ship movement. With the stick, throwint the stick all the way in one direction makes the ship start moving in that direction at a more believable rate.

A ship should take a little time turning, inertia being what it is. I think the stick control does it right. You shouldn't be able to kill you foes by "point & click"'ing on them.

And of course, more mass, more time/energy required to turn. Today I tried two ships rated with different agilities: the EC-88 (medium agility) and the centurion, first non free ship (very high agility). Using the same free battery and the same free engine. They pretty much felt the same, with the joystick (I expect that the mouse control, being instantaneous, wouldn't show any difference either). Is that a bug?

The mouse control is not instant movement, the mouse moves the little plus sign in the middle, the blue circle that follows that is your current ship orientation.
The two ships you tested:
Bus (ec-88): medium
Centurion: Very high

WHat you should try are these ships:
Centurion: very high
Ragnarok: Low

The ragnarok turns slower and wobbles more, the centurionis quick and precise.

Hit F2 to see your ship in the external camera view. Turn with the mouse. Then switch to the joystick. Turn with the joystick. They should be nearly identical.

When you turn with the mouse, your ship doesn't necessarily point in that direction instantly. The circular reticule indicates which direction your ship is pointing. The crosshair only indicates where you're looking. When the two are lined up, you are currently looking at the same direction your ship is facing.

In other words your pilot's head is turning in that direction and the ship slowly catches up to it. The mouse offers one advantage over the joystick because of this--and that's the ability to look all around while boosting.

You're right, can't believe I didn't catch up the the cross and the circle reticles... Yes, that makes much more sense, and in fact is a very good solution to the problem. I remember playing X-Wing on DOS, with a mouse: there the mouse would only input when you moved it. So, as you got to the end of the movement (as you ran out of space to move the thing), the ship would stop turning, so you had to lift the mouse, bring it back to the other side and repeat... dogfight could be a workout :)

It'd be nice to be able to assing the diff views to the hat buttons in the joystick. And also to be able to assign the buttons at all. It could be the linux client, but at the moment I can't do that.

I'm running os x with a 9 button logitech mouse and all my mouse buttons are bound, but I've mapped all the other than the left, middle, and right mouse buttons to keys with logitech's software.