On one of the LCD screens, you can adjust power from shields to engines to weapons, but it is useless. Redirecting power to your engines does not increase your max speed. Redirecting power to your shields does not increase their max HP. Redirecting power to your weapons does not increase their DPS. There are other consoles in larger ships for engineers, hacking, etc, but they are useless because that gameplay has not been implemented. The only thing other players onboard a ship can do is operate turrets.
That's not correct anymore.
Redirecting power to engines makes boost regenerate much faster. Boost in combat is effectively THE thing that you need as it not only works on main engines but also on thrusters.
Redirecting power to shields regenerate them faster. Which is crucial in combat.
Redirecting power to weapons regenerate faster capacitors and increases amount of shots before you deplete cap.
Moreover if you move one of those to minimum it slows down to a crawl.
In active combat all of those has to be used more than in something like Freespace which was pretty heavy on those.
Aside from that you can overdrive some components.
Other players doing something else other than turrets was implemented a while ago. There are now "modes" and different people can use those separately. Like "missile" operator mode, scanning, mining etc. adjusting power triangle, overdrive of components, call ATC etc. More is supposed to come with engineering gameplay in 2032