Thank you! I've always agreed with the shield business, but I've had to resort to stocking up every tiny ship I happened to be piloting with Xsotan Artefacts instead of anything higher than Common SMUs due to the massive penalty incursion on anything even remotely useful. Even the Sector-wide Object Detector eats 80 GW of power... why? It's an Object Detector. You're not gonna beat the crap out of enemies with it, nor break the game. It's literally only there for your convenience, so it was rather inconvenient not to be able to use it properly. 
I digress. Like I've said, thanks for balancing that out more!
yey, updates! me likey your fast iteration times
Yeah I rethought the entire Systems Mod philosophy.
I felt that the 2 shield upgrades were totally imbalanced. Shield Booster being OP with nearly no downside while the Energy to Shield Converter was much more balanced with the -% to generated energy, pretty much restricting players to using 1 GOOD one max. So I balanced them out and made them less effective (I mean shields are still OP OP but this helps a little).
The Generator Upgrades offered easily 80-100% increase of your produced energy totally NEGATING the battery systems AND making it far too easy to build a ship with very little Energy Generator blocks...so they were nerfed and I feel a MAX 50-60% increase per upgrade is still a healthy amount.
And finally, the Turret Upgrades (along with the totally FREE Artifact +5 upgrades) made it far too easy to get your ship a large amount of turrets and in effect crazy firepower with again, literally NO downside... So I made the low tier ones still pretty cheap for starting out the game in smaller ships, BUT made the +3-6 turret upgrades cost exponentially more so if you want to do A LOT of damage, it'll cost you energy and therefore area in your ship and also it'll cost you multiple upgrade slots too so you can't just have tons of firepower AND shields AND generator upgrades, while still having a lot more room for other things.
This feels really good I think and balances out what I felt was really affecting combat.
And like you said, I felt after considering it that other upgrades were more or less for convenience and don't really affect combat so much, so therefore shouldn't really be a concern energy-wise. If you are willing to use up a valuable upgrade slot for Trading, Hyperspace, Radar, etc... than you shouldn't really be restricted by energy requirements.
Note that the Artifacts Mod works hand-in-hand with this one and they really should always be installed together. I may in the future just combine them tbh because of how much more balanced it is with the changes I made to them AND I have to say I am really happy with the work I put into those in particular. Hehe... Humble brag, sorry.
