Ability to fix solar panels

[Superfluous J]

5 hours ago, Aeroboi said:

The only objection is fixing engine bells

This is fair. TBH I was thinking off the cuff of things that encounter the ground on a regular basis.

Seeing how often I LAND on an engine bell, I just figured it'd be nice to have a fixable detriment to it.

[Aeroboi]

Just now, 5thHorseman said:

*snip*

Seeing how often I LAND on an engine bell, I just figured it'd be nice to have a fixable detriment to it.

Fair point, as it happens I try to avoid this All I can say is to recommend the same, although proper landing legs are hard to come by to protect them so we need these first perhaps. But how long have we asked for better ones... proper guess I guess, that has been long 

[linuxgurugamer]

37 minutes ago, 5thHorseman said:

This is fair. TBH I was thinking off the cuff of things that encounter the ground on a regular basis.

Seeing how often I LAND on an engine bell, I just figured it'd be nice to have a fixable detriment to it.

Some things either shouldn't be repairable, or should require an insane amount of resources/time to fix.  IMHO, engine bells are in the latter category.  They aren't landing legs and shouldn't be useable as such

[jealousme]

So what are the best ways to repair it?  I wanted to know.

[Zhetaan]

2 hours ago, jealousme said:

So what are the best ways to repair it?  I wanted to know.

In the stock game, there is no way to repair a solar panel in the same way that you can repack parachutes and repair rover wheels.  The most you can do is replace the solar panel with a new one, either by use of a docking port or with an Advanced Grabbing Unit.

If you don't mind the cheating-adjacent elements of doing so, then you can also revise the persistence file:  the damaged panel will have a line saying something similar to 'STATE = BROKEN', and if you change that to say 'STATE = DEPLOYED', then the panel becomes undamaged.

 

I know I'm rather late to the discussion, but I will add that given the appearance of the solar panels in the game, the ones that break appear to break at the hinges, not the cells.  Admittedly, the break animation may not be the best gauge:  if it were, then the idea of simply 'patching' the rover wheels makes a lot less sense given the visual appearance of the damage--and besides that, real rover wheels are not inflated, so patching would be pointless in the first place.  The point is that a broken solar panel is not quite the same thing as a solar panel that is destroyed outright (with explosions, not flying panel parts).  It may still be unacceptably unrealistic to repair a panel whose hinges are snapped, but I don't think it's fair to assume the cells themselves are shattered.