I haven't played the new crafting system either, except to mine some ore on an asteroid for a change of pace. To keep the system balanced, it might be better if capsules don't produce energy, but shards can. It might be more balancing when placing these small energy sources, that they can only operate for long enough to help generate a simple object, like 10 minutes, and then pop out of existence to simulate being "used up". If a power core can produce 20 energy, it might be somewhat balanced for a shard to only produce 1, and so to need 20 to produce as much e/sec as a power core. Yeah, this may get overpowered with mass-placement, but mass-placement with regular power cores would be even more so, while being more space-efficient, so I don't see it as a problem. (I can regularly farm hundreds of power cores on a single pirate-hunting flight before stopping at a shop to sell.)
So imagine building and setting up hundreds of shards to power-up the factory's built-in capacitors, so it can run for a while, while you are busy doing something else. It may sound a little over-powered, but it is something where the player should be able to build-up their planet-based resources fairly quickly over time, so they can get space-borne without too much trouble or delay (modifiable in the configs, of course). After all, if a player wants to be stuck on a single planet, struggling just to get by, they can play hardcore MineCraft. StarMade is more about spacecraft, so I think the focus of the default game should be to get planet-marooned astronauts into space as quickly as possible.
