had

Solved by going back to the version of every mod where the I last successfully played. Never mass-update CKAN again and god bless CKAN longterm cache of downloaded files.

Came to the conclusion that in my case the engines cause the issue - when I removed the RL10 and RD253 engines, the solar panels started working. But this is no solution ... I want my game back, really fed up that after a month finally I had time to play and spent 6 hours trying to debug so I could actually play...

I am experiencing the very same issue - and this was the only post on the whole internet with keywords "blocked by aero shielding"... I have reinstalled everything, installed realism overhaul and rp0 with dependencies. Actually I haven't played for a month before this (it was all working fine), and now updated mods with CKAN and found this issue... As I understand your issue was solved by itself - any idea what should I do?

I've tried the airbags with realism overhaul + real solar system: from 50m high, dropping core with 4 medium airbags resulted in the airbags overheating and exploding when touching down, shooting the probe out with 200m/s speed. I'd say it doesn't work :/ Too bad, wanted to use for high-g unmanned supply missions.