For ship upgrades, I personally like the plasburst cannon for it's ability to charge up a shot, but the rapid fire are a bit easier to use. You might want to upgrade concussion missles since torpedos are a bit slow and not very agile for use on fighters. They're great on the bigger ships like cruisers or corvettes, but you don't fight those very often. Often the stumbling block in doing ship upgrades are the C28 ship computers. You can buy them for a couple thousand credits from some merchants. You can also find those as well as many other upgrade parts in the wreckage in Toshara orbit, the asteroids in Akiva orbit, or the nebula in Kijimi orbit. Tatooine orbit is a bit sparse, but there's still some upgrade stuff there too. Just fly around and scan for boxes. The ones where you have to hold triangle to collect tend to be the major treasures while the ones you shoot open and tap triangle to collect are minor loot. My advice for upgrades would be first shield upgrade, first gun upgrade, first missle upgrade, second gun upgrade, second shield upgrade, second missle upgrade, first hull upgrade, first engine upgrade, second hull upgrade, second engine upgrade. This gives you good offense with defense being a close second and engines being lower priority. There's also an upgrade that's easy to miss. If you find the crimson dawn vault on Toshara, you'll get a keycard for Renpalli station that opens a door there. There's a ship upgrade in that room and one of the vault keycards. (L3 to use that upgrade if you get it) That's just my opinion though. I like doing space missions and get a lot of upgrade parts. You might focus on another path. As for speeder upgrades, make sure to save first if you're thinking of upgrading the handling since it can be pretty twitchy and you might want to undo the upgrade if you're already finding it to be a bit of a handful to thread through narrow gaps.
You did say you wanted to see a Krait Dragon. Be glad it didn't swallow the tooth or you'd have had to kill it to get it back. lol. The turret does auto target enemies but you have to manually activate it and it only lasts for a certain amount of time before it has to recharge. It's mostly to thin the ranks a bit and take some pressure off when you're getting swarmed.
