The current way to access the energy menu (E key + move mouse) and activate your shield, for example, can be hard to use in the heat of battle. Often times I will try to quickly switch to the shield but moving the mouse to the side to do that is too innacurate and often times I have to try a couple times or more before it finally deploys. I instead propose that this menu is changed to keys such as 'E', 'R'. and 'T' which could be used to activate increased speed, shield, and damage boost respectively.

I have heard many other players voice the same complaint since early beta but nothing has been done yet. I hope the developers will finally listen and change this.

EDIT:I never knew that you could use F1 - F3 to do all this. Thanks for pointing this out. They should just tell players this in the tutorial.

By default you can use F1-F4 (engines, shields, weapons, off), you can also rebind those in the settings.

Jawayne is correct, you can find them in the settings menu.

What I would like is to be able to bind the mouse wheel for energy use. Sadly, presently the game doesn't detect mouse wheel movement, only the middle mouse button.

On the PS4 the energy wheel commands are buggy and therefore garbage. Awful.

Just a matter of practice

I still have lots of issues with the energy wheel and I would suspect I've now had practice. Several times per battle I have to try twice to activate shields properly. I don't want to use hotkeys, it requires I take my hand off the steering wheel mid fight and I hate that (I'm fat-fingered). The energy wheel concept is a great one, it just needs some minor tweaking.

The energy wheel is something I've always disliked. It never felt right and sometimes does the wrong commands. I think the directions or sensitivity needs to be changed. Even FOR HONOR does this 3 direction thing better than Dreadnought...

On PC just bind each action to separate key and profit

Most brand mice have included programs for this. For others the "Microsoft Mouse and Keyboard Center Software" may help. https://www.microsoft.com/accessories/en-us/downloads/mouse-keyboard-center and https://www.microsoft.com/accessories/en-us/support/how-to/mouse/reassign-buttons