I believe both shield and engines will get changing gameplay this year, CIG is implementing "Capacitors" into the new power management system.

Basically a capacitor is something that holds a certain amount of cache energy that you can pull from, and it drains energy from the power generator.

Using the power generator you will be able to decide what gets how much power.

So what we have now is a simplistic temporary system.

In the current system you can also bind shield and power overcharge in the keybinder.

Another cool thing you can do is use https://voiceattack.com/ to control your shield settings.

You can buy better components for your ship in the game.

Use this site to plan your ship upgrades, it also tells you where to get the specific modules: https://www.erkul.games/