When you first reach those yellow star systems, you'll notice they're pretty basic and don't need special drive tech to access them. The real interesting stuff happens when you start pushing into the colored systems where timing your drive upgrades becomes super important - you'll want the cadmium drive before attempting red systems, then emeril for green, and finally indium for those high-energy blue ones. The exact moment to install each upgrade matters since you can't just jump straight to blue systems without the proper sequence of drives, kind of like how particle physics works with its color charges.

Speaking of the physics part, your drives actually follow a similar pattern to how quarks combine in quantum chromodynamics - each upgrade builds on the last one and you need specific configurations to access different energy states. The timing for purple systems is particularly crucial since you'll need to wait until after the campaign, when you can grab that atlantid drive. Good to know that staying in yellow systems early game lets you gather the basic resources needed for your first colored drive upgrades.

For the best resource gathering approach, position yourself near the boundary regions between different colored systems, this lets you quick-jump between resource types without needing to completely recharge your drives every time. Maybe interesting - the way the resources are distributed mirrors how quarks can't exist in isolation just like how you won't find indium in a yellow system no matter how long you search.