1. Whats best to explore, ASP or Krait?
Asp is cheaper, smaller so it's easier to find a landing site
Krait Phantom has better optional internals, a marginally better jump range, better shielding for rough landings or dangerous situations, and excellent speed
Krait Mk II is a bit slower than the Phantom, more expensive, less jump range than the others, but can carry a fighter.
I would personally use the Krait Phantom but they're all very capable explorers.
2. Has board hopping been stopped?
Yes.
3. Best place to get money is Mining?
That depends if you like mining or not. It's certainly one of the quickest ways at the moment, but if your reference is Robigo then there are a *lot* of ways to make that sort of money nowadays.
4. Has engineers been changed since its first release as it put me off.
Yes, considerably. Since the original 2.1 release:
- material requirements for each blueprint have been lowered a lot
- commodity requirements have been removed entirely
- each material collected gives you 3 units to use, not 1
- more alternative routes to find most materials have been added (including material traders, though the exchange rates make this more useful for getting missing low/mid-grade materials than for getting high-grade ones)
- engineering blueprints have been made considerably more predictable. There is a defined maximum, and every roll you make is guaranteed to move you closer to it (with diminishing returns, though - you can stop way before the maximum to get a lot of performance very cheaply)
- engineering blueprints have been made (in general) better - an average Grade 5 roll from 2.1 release can probably be beaten by a modern Grade 3 (and a modern Grade 5 will usually beat a top 1% roll from the original)
- remote workshops have been added to allow you to do a significant amount of engineering without having to travel to engineers
- additional engineers have been added to make more blueprints available and allow players who really don't like particular aspects of the game alternative routes to get access to some blueprints
- material capacities have been substantially increased and are per-material rather than total, so you don't need to discard materials you might need later
- experimental effects are bought with materials rather than being random, and more modules have these available
- the exact workings of many experimental effects have been rebalanced a bit
- the engineer unlock requirements have been reduced (though some are still quite large)
All in all, if you know what you're doing, pick your pinned blueprints carefully, and collect materials as you go along, you can get a ship to G3 all-round in about ten minutes without leaving the hangar just from your spare parts, which gives a performance boost comparable to doing a "best of 3" grade 5 roll on each part in the original (which would probably have taken a few days of collecting materials and flying between engineers to achieve)
It's still possible to spend weeks grinding away on it - if you have a big fleet and decide that absolutely every engineerable module on every ship must be at the top Grade 5 level of performance, you'll be working on that for a while - but you can get a substantial fraction of that performance (75%, say) with much less effort.
The new Krait Phantom is a lovely model, fast, agile and with eight module spaces, it would make a great explorer. But you can get to Beagle Point in a Sidewinder! 
