I have a solar powered base that ran out of power in the eight or so hours (real time) I was offline last night. I left it using just under 300 PU, with Average Solar generated over 1K, and two capacitors. I've uploaded an image with the power stats. I know there were a lot of reports in the past about problems with this with glitches on dedicated servers losing power when people returned, but I don't see any recent ones, so I'm wondering if there's just something in the way the power system works I don't understand. The base has a generator as well, which had a small amount of fuel and that had never been touched while I was online. I was using it as an indicator to make sure the solar was covering everything, and the fuel in it never budged, until returning to find it 0. (I mention this because some of the old reports suggest that it was a combination of solar/generator bases that were buggy.) Anyone have any insight on what's going on? V1.7.1.1
the last solar power generated gets applied over the time the playfield is not loaded. i.e if you leave at night 0 is produced over the whole time. also if someone else gets in render distance of your base the value is refreshed. I always stay at my solar powered bases until the solar is more than the consume bevore i leave; so normally i come back to a 100% capacitor base.
This has been my experience as well. It's a bug the devs have been unable to reproduce (probably due to complexity), but it still happens none the less.
I would expect it to apply the Solar Average Output over the offline time. Maybe that is getting calculated wrong? Or maybe some low solar cloudy weather had made it dip below the amount needed? Or maybe it’s just a bug.
I think it is a incomplete feature, probably other things are more important to the devs than repairing solar. It has been reported as bug before, but i don't remember if it got "known" or "no bug" as tag, but it was some "yea, but we don't fix it right away" type of answer... and it would be so easy to fix, just calculate the real average solar power (not per last day, but over an infinite time as weather is a known % penalty depending on planet type and everything else depends on position on planet, planet in solar system and sun type - so it is a fixed value) and use that. It even only needs to be calculated on placing or removing solar panels. *edit* OK, there would be a way to exploit this by leaving each night and getting more power than would be if it went to zero at night... */edit* Well my guess is the solar code is a mess that nobody understands why it even works, and don't want to touch it with a stick...
I suspect the mess is in the “advance game time based on how long no one has been logged on”. Which is ironic because I think a lot of us wish that didn’t work that way at all.