What's a cooler, what's a power plant, and how do they affect our gameplay?

Power plants make power. Every second they make a certain amount of power according to how healthy they are. You can throttle that to affect your signature, but they're pretty simple components. Coolers take the heat that's in the ship's system and disperse it. They generate a certain amount of signature as well. To do so, they use power. Basically you just have the heat and power resource on your ship moving through the pool system, and power plants contribute to it and coolers pull the heat away.

The reason we also went with the power plants and the coolers first is that pretty much every ship and every ship system uses those to some extent. Everything is either drawing power or generating heat as it operates.