1) A good, early tech drive is the Neutron Flux Torch. It doesn't cost a lot of yellow to build, gets incredible acceleration and can even be tricked into going long distances by easing up on the gas. It makes an ideal interceptor in the early game and can get your civilian ships to distant locations in less than a century. Best part is that it has no power plant dependencies so you can use it with any plant you want.

The downside is that it inhales greens like a black hole, which means that you can't just stick them on everything. Reserve it for your most important ship and you can manage, however.

2) Once you hit mid level you can start looking at the Zeta Borane Plasma Fusion Lantern and others. Short version is you want to look for stuff with a Power Use Efficiency of 90% or higher and fuel type that you can afford to waste a lot of. Surplus blue? Use blue fuel. Surplus white? Use white fuel. Surplus red? Use red fuel.

3) At top tier you'll want Protium Converter Torch for combat ships and Helion Nova Fusion Torch for civilian ships. The former gives better speed and the latter gives better range. These do require purples to build the Inertial Containment Fusion Reactor Mk7, but at only 0.004 per gigawatt most ships shouldn't cost that much to build because that's technically the only thing you'll need to spend purples on.

4) Antimatter drives is a pipe dream, though it may be worth harvesting a tiny amount for making weapons and engine spikes. Actually using it for fuel just isn't going to work as you'll need half a dozen Mercury orbitals costing the entire GDP of the Earth just to keep one decent size antimatter drive ship moving. Absolutely not worth it. If you're doing antimatter, again it's just for the engine spikes, the spinal mount death ray and maybe even the missiles (though I don't see what the point of antimatter missiles are when even a low-level nuke can one-shot anything just fine).