How Fast Do The Starships Actually Go?

It's meters / second. You can verify this with a stop watch and the target distance display. You can verify the distance is meters by flying the length of the Star Destroyer, which is known to be 1600m.

@Sati_Sati Well its definitely slow if you take into account that you're in space lol but I guess if you take into account of the scale of the planets it seems like you're going faster

Agreed, i feel its failing us, because they are using the cinematic references, which is highly base off the original movies. Yet most of the scenes are of them landing and precision maneuvers, but if they use everything after jedi, theyll get better examples. ships go slow when they are maneuvering (traffic), but not in full speed space. There should be better accounting of the danger factor that makes the whole star wars universe possible.   I mean, I can see the reasoning behind it, but this game should be an example like the original series set a bar to improve the play base. 

@KajiOni485I think what others fail to understand and has rally put us in an awkward position, is that you tend to believe nobody wil be driving these things essentially. I say this because its your job to control your speed and thats part of the game. It would be obvious to spot a low level or new player whos slamming into everything and you can guess where that goes.
Though the point is you have a throttle for a reason, although its not correctly applied to this game, it should allow you to achieve remarkable maneuvering and evasion tactics. We dont have that, rather we get a cover job called Overcharge Boosting to hide this botched mechanics.
Its apparent when you need to keep balancing weapons and shields and hull. The acceleration should be very low and you would need to use overcharged engines to achieve higher accelerated throttle and maneuvering. The boosting is and always will be just a countermeasure with hyper drifting, this can all be controlled by normal throttle controlling when activated under a countermeasure component button and you dont need to do any special button controls. A Turbo Booster will allow you to exceed your max speed for a period of time, just like what we have now with OCBoosters. The thing about this is that you can select it if you wish. So you need to rely on the speed of the ships and learn to handle that speed like you handle the Boost Drifting. Just part of a the pilots skill set. The thing is they dont need to follow the parameters to the letter', Just in the ball park of making it work. Something this game has puled short on, unfortunately.