To tell you the truth, I already figured out that the Smokey and the Bandit things were sort of tacked on for flavor, and not really part of the original game concept, but I used examples from that in hopes to spur you on to deepen the gameplay.
As a first game ever, this one is very well done. Not many first games ever by anyone are this polished. Incredibly good job! However, I think the most important thing in my post, and what you should pay attention to the most, is this sentence: "This seems more like a prototype of a system than a full game."
The things like ship speed and the others are important, but the most important thing that stops this game from really being fun is that there isn't much to do and it doesn't have much character. Whether you want to flesh out the Smokey and the Bandit aspect or go in a different direction, in order for this to be a fully realized game, there just needs to be more complexity. If you are ready to dump this game, call it finished, and move onto the next then that's fine and understandable, but if not, I think there is really a lot of potential here to make a really good game, and I don't think I've ever said that to anyone about their very first game before. :-)
What you have right now is a damn good framework for what could be built into a really fun game, but not so much a fun game itself. Look at a game like Orbox C. It's a really really simple game concept. Get the square from the start to the end place. Easy enough. But then they add on additional goals to that which make the game more interesting and varied. Sometimes you have 3 or 4 goals in one level, like you have to get the square from beginning to end but first you have to collect all the glowing things and also break all the ice squares and also turn all the sides of the circle things on. This is a concept that could be really handy in your game. The primary mission is to gather fuel, but there are other things that have to also be done. And the intensity has to ramp up as the game goes on.
Also I do have an idea of about how much time it took to get through the levels. On my final playthrough (on difficulty 100) it usually took about 2 minutes (120 seconds) to get through a level. This explains why I never saw enemies I guess. I was almost always out before they spawned.