One thing I've really come to appreciate about Starfinder's approach to starships is that this pretty central part of the game is treated as less of an economic system than a leveling system. The game assumes you have a ship, and doesn't worry about whether you have the credits to afford one.
Selecting the components of your ship has a cost in "Build Points," which limits how powerful your ship can be as you level up. The APL (average party level) determines the Tier of the ship (the tier is basically the "level" of the ship) and as you level up and your ship has more build points, you can get fancier systems.
The most important system is the Power Core, which provides power to the rest of the ship's systems. While life support and artificial gravity are handwaved as taking negligible power, other systems like thrusters, weapons, shields, the ship computer, and other amenities will consume a certain amount of "PCU," or Power Core Units. A fancier power core will provide more PCUs to spend, but of course it will also cost more Build Points ("BP") to get, so you need to balance the budget. You could build a ship that has very powerful shields at the cost of other systems being less powerful, but I think most would probably try to go for a balanced approach.
There's a nuance here when it comes to Drift engines. In Starfinder, Drift is the technology that allows beings other than gods (or those who have earned the gods' favor) to travel faster than light, by essentially plane-shifting into another plane called the Drift. The Drift can only be accessed through technology, not magic. Once in the Drift, travel returns to normal thrusters, but distance is also a little funny - there are Drift beacons found on various worlds, and the more drift beacons there are in a place, the faster one can get there. Actual distance means nothing. Absalom Station, which is the central hub of the Starfinder setting, has an intensely powerful beacon, so regardless of where you are in the galaxy, you can always get back there in a few days. But even if two star systems were next-door neighbors within "The Vast," (aka the outer reaches of known space,) it would take just as long to go between them as it would be to travel there from anywhere else.
More powerful drift engines will allow you to reduce the time spent traveling through the Drift. Rather than constantly consuming a number of PCUs, you only need to have a minimum amount your core can produce, as the assumption is that you'll be turning off various systems in order to engage the drift engine (explicitly, you have to turn off your thrusters to do so.)
Naturally, starship combat has its own rules that work a bit differently than normal combat. Player characters will have specific roles on the ship - you can be a Captain, Pilot, Engineer, Gunner, or Science Officer. Each round of combat is then divided into different phases - Engineering, Helm, and Gunnery phases. Rather than having an initiative order, the Engineering phases happen simultaneously as people work to repair systems or divert power. The helm phase has each pilot (a ship can only have a single pilot and a single captain) rolls to see who acts first - but it's the loser of the role who has to go first, as the second pilot will be able to decide what to do based on what the other ship is doing. For instance, if the enemy ship maneuvers so that they can attack your ship with their most powerful weapon, you might then maneuver to get out of that weapon's firing arc.
The last phase is when people fire off their weapons, which are resolved in order of who moved when, but all take effect regardless of whether the enemy ship is destroyed or its weapons disabled.
Each role has a number of actions it can take, which are detailed in the chapter. The Captain is the only one who can act during any phase (though still only once per round, I believe.) The Captain has various ways to aid their crew or distract and taunt the enemy. Science officers can scan enemy ships to target specific systems or rebalance shields. Pilots can do various stunt maneuvers to position their ship more favorably. Engineers can repair systems or divert power to give a system a boost.
I think most starship combat is built to be one-on-one between the party's ship and an enemy, though I imagine as a party and GM get more comfortable, they might go for more complex battles. Notably, a starship that is large enough can have a hangar in it, and one could potentially have a fighter launch from it.
Generally, there isn't really much of a rule for having ships catastrophically explode. Usually if you reduce a ship to 0 hit points, it's just adrift. That said, I think a GM could make for a more dramatic moment by their own discretion. Still, I think you could very much build an adventure in which you need to first defeat a ship in ship-to-ship combat and, once it's disabled, have the party board the ship and take it over.
There are many ship frames to choose from, which go from little racers and fighters to shuttles, light freighters (which I think is what the Millennium Falcon would count as) to, eventually, battleships and dreadnoughts. The Huge and larger ships generally require a crew that is larger than the average party, but I could imagine a high-level party might have a number of NPCs serving as their crew.
A level 20 party has 1000 BP to work with, and if you wanted a Dreadnought, the frame itself would take 200 of those. (You'd also need at least 125 crew). But I think the assumption here is that you'll likely keep the same frame over the course of a campaign and just upgrade it with each tier. What began as a dinky junker will, by the end of a high level campaign, be a legendary vessel that can wipe the floor with ships a hundred times its size.
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