Yep, what Kitkun said. The research icon looks like a warp trail sort of thing heading towards a distant star, should be the same for all races (amazing the little things you stop paying attention to after a while). After you research it, just right click on the other star/planet/whatever. Your ships will go to their system's star and from there jump to the other star - it's always star<>star travel. All stars are also automatically connected, so you can go from a star to any other star on the map, unlike a normal phase lane.

As for the realistic maps, the game comes with an in-game map generator that you can set to create whatever map type you like. You can easily make 50 stars with ~10 planets each, and have direct control over how many are habitable, and fun things like that Feel free to play around it!

if by ground combat you mean your population running away from bombardment then yes this game has it all!

seriouly a better rework of the game would be sending in your ground troops, and part of the planet's upgrade is the number of troops stationed at each your planets, essentially replacing planet hitpoints with troops numbers

bombarment ships as troop transport and the shielding for the tech would be a shield blocking transport onto the surface...since as in star trek, you can't transport thru shields and too dangerous to land troops using transports because of the space battle.