Off topic, but I always wondered why most ships didn't need a power plant on-board for their systems.
They do; such a power plant is simply assumed to be part of the engines and that it produces enough power for all the auxilliary systems and housekeeping and so forth that the ship needs. This is why every level of engine tech has an associated level of power plant tech as a pre-requisite.
When Aurora was first being developed, one of the guiding principles was to avoid anything like a Star Fleet Battles-style power allocation system -- so as not to slow down the game play. This is why shields are either ON or OFF and power up at a fixed rate, and why the player has basically no control over what happens on a ship that can't fully power all of its energy weapons.
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Granted, with the current system it is not possible for damage to leave a ship unpowered -- or
underpowered -- for basic systems. Though you can choose to interpret any sort of damage to 'system X' as "loss of power to system X" rather than "system X is destroyed," such a distinction has no effect on result, repair cost or time.
Other than adding certain systems to the 'Electronic DAC' I'm not sure what a separate power plant could do.