They don't consume fuel. CV solar panels put out the power they state, 50W for small and 100W for large, constantly. They don't need fuel and they don't need light.

Interesting. Might have been a bug on my end that they only worked when fueled, game was putting out alot of errors

Oprindeligt skrevet af Confibious:

Interesting. Might have been a bug on my end that they only worked when fueled, game was putting out alot of errors

You still need a generator and fuel, even if solar completely covers your power needs.

Damn was hopin to reduce my massive fuel usage

You still don't seem to understand, solar panels do reduce your fuel usage by way of reducing energy consumption as opposed to offsetting it. Having a generator is one of the base requirements for having a working ship. So even if you have enough power generation from the solar panels that you don't need a generator, you still have to have one.

https://psteamcommunity.yuanyoumao.com/workshop/filedetails/discussion/2550354956/3057366778465573862/

A small mobile solar panel produces 50 watts of power, and a large mobile solar panel produces 100 watts of power. You may have a maximum of 24 of each installed on a CV (but it's not super easy to work them into a design, they're fragile and take up a lot of space and the small solar panel is missing some shapes).

There's something you need to watch out for right now - the fuel bug.

I think there's a vanilla bug that affects RE where, when your ship hasn't used fuel for a long time, something goes wrong. It doesn't calculate fuel right. After you change something like turning on shields or engines, it calculates power usage as if the ship had been using that amount of power for THE ENTIRE TIME.

So like if you're using 50 megawatts of power to charge your shields, the game goes "oh this ship has been using 50 megawatts of power since the last time this guy logged out, I need to use 999,999,999,999,999 fuel now"

if your ship has a lot of solar panels but it's still using a lot of fuel, you might have just got bit by the bug. The solar panels work great. If you check your power usage before you put a small mobile panel on, then check it after, you'll see it went down by 50

You have to think of power in three stages: Production, Storage, Consumption
Currently, only Bases make use of the second (Storage) stage, and only for Solar Batteries, so we can ignore that here.

What matters, is that your vessel needs Production to work.
Why mobile solars do not count is actually pretty simple, due to game limitations - they do not Produce power, rather they have a negative Consumption.
This means, having mobile solar panels decreases how much Consumption there is for your vessel.
But of course, a vessel still needs Production, which can only be provided by Generators at this point in time.

Because the vanilla game does not have negative Consumption as a mechanic, the developers never thought to add in a "Is consumption zero?" check, because in vanilla, such a thing cant happen.

the same bug affects base solar, power is calculated upon return to an inactive playfield as if the sun were in its present state for the entirety of the time the playfield was inactive. So you get a hojillion hours of sunlight if you're lucky and a hojillion hours of darkness if you're unlucky.

And if you were making one iron ingot when you left, when you return 10 hours later you will find the constructor has been using power to make one iron ingot continuously for 10 hours