Cruiser Command

Frankly, I think the introduction is good right now. I haven't had the time to play with that many new players, but most of them were able to successfully launch a miner and use it effectively.

The tutorial right now is close to what you described. It explains how to get to the hangar(and pings the teleporters on the minimap to make sure the player understands where to go) and then when the player comes to the bottom floor, it pings the hangar consoles to show where to go next. It also has small pop-up notices about low health, full inventory, excess energy(accelerate mining beam) and more.

Still, some people manage to get lost in the ship or mess up horribly despite this, but I'm starting to lean towards the opinion that those people are just really stupid.

If you meant the tutorial and not the introduction, I have to say that I'm not sure if that's the best use of my time. Very few players play the tutorial. I feel like it would be worth improving the tutorial if CC becomes very popular in the future. If it becomes so popular that people try it because it's one of those popular games on the front page, you might feel more inclined to do the tutorial, idk.

best way to get others into the game is to encourage em i find, whenever they make a success i say gj or excellent! the usual and always be helpful and keep an eye on them, i sometimes sacrafice time on BC (where i mostly am anyways) to look at what they are doing.
Another is if they start hopping from console to console ill guide them....guyz, easiest trick with navigations is,
"Hey *name*, hit R to ping the map, its very usefull"
or weps
"Ya so just click on the map and it will auto fire for you, try not to waste shots as the battery will run out of power sooner then later"
and instead of raging and shouting for power
"i wouldnt touch that if i where you lol, you could accidently blow up the ship"
Upgrades
"Upgrade Miners first...always as they are the most important upgrades to get early on...unless your rushing"

Of course most players will guide new players on small ships its the part helping them figure out they are on a BC and they can launch small ships thats the hard part. Of course there will be those that dont pay attention but i try anyways and usually get more success as allot of players are unwilling to tell that they are new because they worry of getting raged at and kicked (for some odd reason, i think dota and LoL had a hand in that) But looking out for them is always very good at growing a community, i really dont care about sacrificing a pub game in order to grow the community which will help ME in the long run.

I was not aware that there are pings if you are a new player. That is awesome! Yeah, it is good to know, since now I can point it out to them that there will be automatic pings to show them where to go. If they then can't follow directions, I leave them in the hands of god.

Edit: I am assuming that this built-in pinging happens if your rep is < 2 or something like that in a real game, not in the tutorial. I was referring to the real game, so they don't have to interpret our "Now step on that circle", instead of them seeing a ping or something telling them to "Step on that circle".