Now that you should be able to jump around at will now, I hope my little spreadsheet will be of extreme usefulness now (page 2 will work wonders; I hope you kept track of those homeworlds and special locations for reference), regarding Quasi-space navigation. Nonetheless, you should already know how it should work, input coordinates, and the spreadsheet will tell you the most efficient path Quasi-Space-wise. Fuel costs of using the portal spawner as well as the time are already calculated for the transit (will always be greater than 10 fuel cost; time becomes more paramount; but at least you should be able to worry about meeting the Pkunk in time far less now).
If the mystery of the ORZ is bothering you, you can always land on the Androsynth homeworld, and see if they left any notes behind in their ruins. And regarding the ORZ tongue, they are a species that speaks mostly in context, rather than basic terminology.
EDIT:
With your ship design, I suggest you keep the 3 dynamos and just add more Shivas on top of that. Look at the power chart on page 3 of my spreadsheet to find the most efficient power setup, given the amount of room you have left.
My advice about helping the Pkunk; wait them out. Wait moments before they enter Yehat space before you talk them out of meeting them. They won't be offended (plus it would buy you a bunch of time). They're clairvoyant, so they should see it coming. BTW, a nice shortcut, one of the Quasi-portals parks you right next door to the Pklunk territory. Just pop into their homeworld and talk to them there (any ship will do). Punch in your "To" and "From" coordinates first, so you can see which path is quicker or more fuel efficient (Down to the nearest tenth)). Like, starting from Earth, you save fuel via Hyperspace, compared to by portal, where you save a day or 2 (1.3 to be exact), at the expense of some extra fuel (maybe 7 (6.8 ) units; mostly due to the cost of using a Quasi-portal).
EDIT EDIT:
I already played the game tons of times in the past back when the game was new, I just made the spreadsheets mostly for the hell of it, and added onto it until it became a Swiss-army knife for the game.