I posted this on the steam forums, then decided I might get a better response here. I Played SE long before I started playing EGS, and in SE you can have solar and batteries on ships, it doesn't always produce enough power to keep everything running, but sometimes it's just enough to keep you alive long enough to get main power back online, and, it makes for some really nice looking ships sometimes. As a result, I am attempting to modify my game so that Solar can be used on a CV, I found them in the blocksconfig file and changed it so that they could be placed on a CV, however, capacitor will not charge and the solar will not run the ship at all, even with 10 solar panels on the ship and everything turned off but the vents. Does anyone know if there is another another file I can change to make this work or is it hardwired to not work no matter what? Thanks.
Solar was never intended to be used on vessels. It was only ever intended to be used on static structures that never move (bases). So for this reason they frequently bug out and stop producing if they are on a vessel (vessel moves, that bugs out the calculations). Even reforged had to remove the solar panels and make their own version of a solar panel because the vanilla ones bug out so frequently. Not only do the calculations bug out, but in MP having vanilla solar panels and capacitors on a vessel can cause giant pieces of the vessel to just randomly get deleted by the game (or even the entire vessel get deleted). So use solar panels and capacitors on vessels at your own risk. They don't work correctly, they were never intended to be used for that, and they WILL bug out all the time. There is nothing you can modify to get them to work correctly either. It is a lost cause with vanilla solar on vessels until (if) the devs change it on their side (which may never happen). Best you can really do is look how they did their new custom "solar panels" in reforged and go from there.
Sometimes you get lucky and solar panels on vessels just works, at least for a little while. Especially in single player. Or perhaps the solar output calculations do bug out but you get lucky and they bug out in a way where they just continue to produce power, so you never notice. Or it works for a while until you change playfields once, twice, or a dozen times. Sometimes once it messes up you can pick up and place down a single solar panel, or maybe it takes all of them, and then it starts working again. Other times it is the capacitors. Other times a game restart is all it takes. It's random. Sometimes it seemingly never happens for some people. One thing is for sure, we are doing things that weren't intended and aren't going to be supported at this time. If you have already successfully modified it so the game allows you to place them down on said vessel then you have already done basically everything you can do. That is the step that makes them work. Only other thing you can really change is their efficiency in the same file.
Posted this in your Steam post as well but this is an explanation why Vermillion had to change them for Reforged: https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/filedetails/discussion/2550354956/3057366778465573862/
Thanks, I had been searching google for anything that might explain the problem but wasn't having any luck. The only thing I could find was post after post of "it doesn't work" but no reason as to why, I was hoping it was just a setting in one of the files that I could change but it sounds like it's "hard coded" of a sorts to not work on CV's, so to do what I want I will have to figure out how to make my own scenario in the default style and then figure out how to do the same thing with solar that was done in Reforged Eden until they recode the default panels to work. It would have been nice to have them for emergency power, but looks alone will have to do.
