It can be pretty confusing out there in space.  The first little while I got myself disoriented.  There are both horizon and roll indicators that are helpful once you understand how they work.  When you get in a fighter you should be in the standard horizontal position and see one of the arrows on left or gith of the hud in the middle area of the side indicator bar.  Nose up or down and watch the arrow move, as well as the horizontal bars across the hud.  When you are level again roll left and right to see the horizontal bars move relative to the roll.  The easiest way to re-orient yourself is to bring yourself level on the horizontal (0) plane and roll back to vertical (0) position.  Keep in mind taht you can steer left or right, rather than roll, to move towards the action.  Also, around the hud are icons for capitol ships and you can use these to orient yourself in that direction (for a specific ship) and then nose up or down to see where it is in 3d space.

I hope all of that makes sense.  It was understanding the hud better that helped me.

One thing to note is that in the hud, the movement indicator for nose up/down, was sometime usnig the right arrow and sometimes the left, depending on the fighter.  Weird but true.  Another bug I suppose?