Panels in direct sunlight but they're not

[THX1138]

Solar panels clearly in shadow but it says they're in direct sunlight. This happens frequently.

[Rocket In My Pocket]

This is a known issue with the way the game calculates lighting. (There is a Dev post about it somewhere around here from fairly recently.)

The game doesn't actually determine when objects are blocking light in a "dynamic" sense, it just "shuts the lights off" whenever it thinks the Sun is being occluded.

I wouldn't expect it to get changed any time soon.

Edited July 17, 2016 by Rocket In My Pocket

[foamyesque]

5 minutes ago, Rocket In My Pocket said:

This is a known issue with the way the game calculates lighting. (There is a Dev post about it somewhere around here from fairly recently.)

The game doesn't actually determine when objects are blocking light in a "dynamic" sense, it just "shuts the lights off" whenever it thinks the Sun is being occluded.

I wouldn't expect it to get changed any time soon.

 

Sometimes it isn't very smart about the occlusion-- I've had panels read as being in direct sunlight despite most of Kerbin being in the way. :v

[KerikBalm]

Also, I've noticed some HE related bugs with this.

The sun was directly overhead... but exposure was only 0.33?

They'd start to produce almost nothing (less thant 10% exposure IIRC) when the sun was still very much overhead... and they'd be producing power  with even better exposure (nearly 1.00) when it was night.

That only occured for me when hyperediting over to duna, and I figure it was probably related to the panels assuming that they were on kerbin or their orientation was calculated relative to kerbin instead of duna, or something.

Did you HE over to Pol?

[THX1138]

I use hyperedit and this vessel may have been hyperedited at some point or docked to something which was hyperedited but it was not hyperedited to Pol.

[Snark]

Moving to Tech Support, as this is more of a technical why-is-this-happening problem (or possibly a bug) than a suggestion per se.