It's really fun. Some tips from someone who knows someone who knows the people who work on the game:
Your ship has armor which ablates damage, on four facings: the front, the sides, and the rear. The armor is worn down, along with your ship's integrity, as you take damage, but you can turn yourself to keep fresh armor protecting you which minimizes the damage the enemy does to you.
If you're in over your head, run away. Unless you know you can kill an enemy before you go down, or at least can inconvenience them long enough for your teammates to accomplish some goal, you're more valuable alive than dead. The more deaths you suffer, the longer it takes for you to respawn. You can always jump out of and back into a system faster than you can respawn.
On that note, if you can, kill any enemy you have the advantage on. The flagship has a disabling beam that can stop an enemy ship from jumping for an extra second or two, which is often enough to land a killing blow. Otherwise, just concentrate and pour on the fire. Don't forget you have a lot of secondary systems, oftentimes extra weapons of some kind that will let you do more damage faster.
Stay together with your team unless you know with complete certainty that you can do something useful lone-wolfing. All ships benefit at least somewhat from having backup, even if it just means that the enemy might not be concentrating their fire on you, and the more firepower you can pour out, the quicker you can kill enemies, or at least force them to retreat. The sniper and support type ships especially benefit from having allies around, since they're both squishy and only effective in certain scenarios (the sniper being best far away from attacking enemies, naturally, and the support best used to support other ships, also naturally).