I didn't know the ships varied so much. This is going to be a great game when it's done. How many ships do you have so far?
I only have two (Avenger Titan and Freelancer), and will probably be buying a limited one (Dragonfly or maybe a Hull series) whenever there's another sale. I am a subscriber, though, which means I get to fly a different ship for free each month, which is a nice perk.
At this point I've bought a new space suit and explored all the jump points on Crusader.
There are no jump points in the game yet. A jump point is what you use to travel between systems, and currently you can only play in a small part of one system; quantum drive is for sub-light travel within a system, and that's what you can use now. The points you have available to travel to are saved coordinates in your ship's computer, and those will vary depending on what missions you've taken and other factors (for instance, if you have a crime stat then you can quantum to the outlaw base, GrimHEX).
The parts of the game that aren't bugged to hell are breathtaking. I explored an area with an asteroid belt and was able to land on one of the larger ones.
That sounds like the Yela asteroid belt. Did you find the GrimHEX outlaw base among the asteroids? If not, you can always just commit a crime and then die to respawn there.
I also got a ride from a guy with a giant red ship (can't remember the name). Took about 20 minutes to find an exit since I entered through an engineering bay and I was never able to find the access point again. It also had a little console that let you redirect power to the main systems of the ship.
The only vaguely red, flight-ready, multicrew ship I'm aware of is the
Caterpillar Pirate Edition.
All of the ships in the game right now are tiny compared to the capital ships that haven't been released yet. Squadron 42 will feature the Idris and the Javelin, which are both enormous military ships comparable to the likes of the USS Enterprise or Battlestar Galactica. The Bengal is bigger and slower yet, taking the honour of the largest UEE (human) ship, but the largest ship in the game will be the Vanduul Kingship at 3 kilometres long.
Edit: Here's a size comparison for a bunch of ships:
https://robertsspaceindustries.com/community/citizen-spotlight/1574-Ship-Size-ComparisonLike you said, I probably should have opted for a more advanced ship since mine only has 2 basic laser canons, and no missiles, which makes shooting people down pretty hard.
You can
upgrade at any time. You can also change your weapon loadout by renting ship weapons with REC -- weapons bought with REC and equipped to ships appear in the PU, but ships bought with REC can't be flown in the PU.
Supposedly, they're going to start making ships buyable with in-game currency before the end of this year, though they've sprinted past so many deadlines already that I'll believe that when it happens.