My buddy and I play together on a private survival server sometimes.

At the time we were both too dumb to set up hydrogen thrusters properly, so we basically designed a simple ship (if you can call it that) with a cockpit facing straight up, a small reactor, a cargo hold, and a ton of ion/atmospheric thrusters also pointing straight up. With the cargo hold we put in a bunch of components for solar panels, refineries, an antenna, assemblers, and enough steel to start a simple platform. DO NOT: pack too much shit, even if you've got a metric ton of thrusters they can't handle much heavy lifting. After you've started your starter base, (i try to build it on a large asteroid for resources and a solid anchor) you can go a couple ways, you could shuttle up more stuff from your ground base, or you could scrap your boat and try to build the rest with that. FYI: there is a period for about 4 kilometers long (i think it's about 9k off the ground?) where neither thrusters will properly thrust, if you feel like you aren't accelerating enough, and you are not going 100m/s at the start of this zone, try to land the ship on the planet and shed some weight or add more thrusters.

Hope this helps my guy.