Other power distribution mods have run into issues of becoming vastly overpowered, but I believe it is possible to avoid that. The following goals, ratios, and limitations are what I think would keep the parts in Crewed Power Distribution (CPD for short) competitive with vanilla without supplanting it.

Ranged and whole ship reactors should offer the player new options when building ships.

1. This goal has already been accomplished and is the main draw of CPD.
   
2. For example, defending the exposed area of a thruster from missiles is a challenge, because HE missiles that miss get a second chance to hit a ship in the rear. With CPD, I was able to add Point Defense parts outside of the armor around the thruster. The caveat is that while it provided better protection, each Point Defense part was also far more vulnerable to being destroyed.

The cost of the ranged and whole ship reactors should offset the costs and tonnage of the crew and corridors that are replaced.

1. This goal is in progress and probably the most difficult one to get right. With ranged reactors, I’ve been able to cut out enough crew and parts for them (like walkways, capacitors, etc.) to net less cost or weight in total than a vanilla ship. At the moment, ranged reactors are more credit and weight-efficient, making vanilla parts redundant.
   
2. For example, the inserters from Jani’s Shipyard can replace crew in loading weapons at greater speeds, they are immune to stun and offer an uninterrupted high throughput which is great for Deck Cannons. However, they require additional power, Power Ports, command points, and end up with a higher total credit cost.
   
3. Currently, trade-offs such as command points, larger size and weight per reactor, and higher cost are a good start, but there is room for more tweaking. I think the larger size and weight are in a good spot, but the others need another look depending on some of the changes I’ve listed in this post.

No combination of reactors should allow for unlimited and uninterrupted power supply.

1. This goal is in progress and is mainly a problem with shields in that they recharge so fast that can withstand being spammed with nukes indefinitely. Some sort of power transfer delay or limit for the CPD reactors is needed because the most expensive reactor being a million credits doesn’t matter when it makes a ship practically invincible with a small number of well-placed shields.
   
2. For example, the Ammo Storage tiles from
   Advanced Ammo Storage & Supply acts as a conveyor belt and automatically loads ammo (restricted to 1 type) on them into a weapon directly. They are 50% more expensive per tile than vanilla Storage Bays but don’t need any power despite moving and loading ammo far faster than an equivalent amount of credits spent on crew could. To balance it out, I manually lowered the ammo transfer so that it was slightly slower than what a crew member running through a corridor could do. So there is a tradeoff between higher throughput using additional crew as in vanilla or stacking more of these tiles which adds comparatively more weight.
   
3. Something similar to the above example is needed in CPD. Basically, any CPD reactor shouldn’t indefinitely distribute more power than what an equivalent number of crew could to max out a vanilla reactor. For a vanilla large reactor, it has 24 capacity but batteries are 3 in size, so 8 crew showing up at once would max it out. However, every second it replaces 13.5 of its power capacity, so the real number is closer to 12 crew per second to max it out. This gives us a base to work from.
   
4. Okay, the part limit mentioned above sounds harsh, but let me give an example to show why this kind of limitation is good. Before the most recent updates to this mod, a ship I designed had enough energy weapons, shields, and thrusters to max out a single large ranged reactor. In the early phase of the battle, it is quite strong because of the high capacitor storage. As the battle wears on, that storage continually runs down and isn’t being replaced fast enough until the point that the ship are weapons, shields, and engines turn off at random. This is great for balance because there is an inherent trade-off, either use crew with vanilla priority assignments to determine what parts are the most important to keep online or use one of the CPD reactors and give everything priority potentially leading to unintended shutdowns.

Suggested Ratios

The following stats are in order from foundation level on up, meaning the first listed stat should be the least likely to be adjusted.

Power Generation:
Matches vanilla reactor counterpart. In general, 1:1 for this stat is easier for the player to understand and work with.

Power Capacity:
Matches the vanilla reactor counterpart plus the vanilla 4x4 capacitor (which has 18 capacity, or 4.5 per tile). For example, a 5x2 CPD Small Reactor should have 8 capacity for the 4x4 reactor section plus 27 capacity for the remaining 3x2 section, equaling 35 total capacity. A Medium 6x3 would be 56.5 (16 + 40.5) and a Large would be 240 (24 + 216). ETTM scales based on its reactors and capacitors.

Power Output:
Matches the maximum output an equivalent number of crew a vanilla reactor could handle. In the example I laid out above, a large reactor maxes out at ~12 crew per second grabbing 3-sized batteries from it. A small reactor would be 9, and a medium reactor would be 10. For example, a CPD large reactor should be able to bring online 4 small shields (24 capacity total) in ~1.7778 seconds (same rate vanilla reactor refills itself), but couldn’t provide much power to anything else if its extra capacitors have been used up. Every other part needing power beyond this point would increase the ~1.7778 second time frame, so bringing 8 small shields online would take ~3.5556 seconds and so on.

Command Points:
Scales on a percentage of vanilla reactor counterpart command parts, the whole ship’s reactor percentage is 2x ranged. For example, if the percentage is 20% for Whole Ship reactors then the small reactor (2x2 matches Cockpit) is 10 command points, the medium reactor (3x3 matches Control Room) is 50, and the large reactor (4x4 matches Bridge) is 200. 10% for Ranged reactors is 5, 25, and 100.

Cost:
There are too many variables to consider for a definite answer at this time. Since this stat is the easiest ratio to play with, the other ratios should be sorted first, and then the cost of each reactor adjusted to match its new capabilities and limitations.

Reactor Limitations

No part can be powered by 2 CPD reactors at once to prevent getting around any power output limits.

Ranged reactors:
A minimum distance from other ranged reactors equal to the size of their range. For example, 2 large ranged reactors need 60m of space between their edges. This is similar to the minimum distance limitation Deck Cannons have.

Whole Ship reactors:
Maximum of 1 Whole Ship reactor per ship, meaning no ranged reactors either. The Core Shield in Galactic Allegiance has this limitation because having more than one would be OP. The same reason applies here, especially when factoring in ETTM reactors.

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Man, that all sounded way simpler in my head than it does writing it all out.