That's what I ended up doing. I found some sort of trade depot after a while, and I'd managed to find some nav data during my wandering so I was able to spend that on the ship summon.You can actually make your ship fly to you if it has enough fuel to take off. There is a summon ship/exocraft option and you can make your ship land right in front of you if you like.
When you get the weapons guy for your base his quest line ends with you killing sentinels until you get a walker and kill that. Otherwise for the most part they are a mere annoyance on planets when you are trying to get resourcesI'm not very far along yet and I see there's some stuff that might involve killing sentinels (mercenary stuff?) but I'm guessing I'd either need to find a planet that won't spawn giant walker sentinels (sentinel activity per planet?) or I'm really going to need to gear up for combat.
These guys continue their awesome work. More upgrades for the next generation consoles and PC...for free.
"Wait, there's grouping?"Anybody have any good suggestions on YouTube channels to watch for this? I'd really like to attempt to get deep into it (can't make it past 10 hours), but I always fall short because of how unfriendly it is to "grouping".