is it possible to fix a broken solar panel?

[king of nowhere]

one of my ships has 2 OX-STAT-XL solar panels that give a status of "broken". they do not appear damaged or anything, though.

i finally brought a level 3 engineer to it, but there is no "repair" option. is it possible to repair the part, or is the engineer limited to fixing wheels and landing struts?

 

i also checked in the savegame file; the ship in question has 8 solar panels of that kind, but i can't seem to find any obvious difference in the status of two of them. if i decide to repair by manumitting the file, what should i do?

[bewing]

Only wheels and legs.

[Zhetaan]

14 hours ago, king of nowhere said:

i also checked in the savegame file; the ship in question has 8 solar panels of that kind, but i can't seem to find any obvious difference in the status of two of them. if i decide to repair by manumitting the file, what should i do?

Each broken solar panel in the vessel will have a line in the save file that says something to the effect of (and I do apologise for not knowing exactly, but I'm not near a save file that I can test):  STATUS = BROKEN.  It could be DeployState = BROKEN--the point is that BROKEN is the key word.  You'll need to change that line to say either EXTENDED or DEPLOYED--again, I don't remember which, and you'll want to check a known-good OX-STAT-XL to know for certain--but that will fix the panels.

The large OX-STAT panels do not have a visual indicator of their damaged state, unlike the extendable panels that shatter when broken.  The only way to know for certain whether they are working is to check the part action window and see whether they are capable of generating charge.  Broken panels will have a status message of 'Broken!' in the part action window.

[king of nowhere]

7 hours ago, Zhetaan said:

Each broken solar panel in the vessel will have a line in the save file that says something to the effect of (and I do apologise for not knowing exactly, but I'm not near a save file that I can test):  STATUS = BROKEN.  It could be DeployState = BROKEN--the point is that BROKEN is the key word.  You'll need to change that line to say either EXTENDED or DEPLOYED--again, I don't remember which, and you'll want to check a known-good OX-STAT-XL to know for certain--but that will fix the panels.

The large OX-STAT panels do not have a visual indicator of their damaged state, unlike the extendable panels that shatter when broken.  The only way to know for certain whether they are working is to check the part action window and see whether they are capable of generating charge.  Broken panels will have a status message of 'Broken!' in the part action window.

actually, they don't.

other parts do. i have seen the "broken" status on some other parts, but not on those solar panels.

on the other hand, i decided to go for the brute force approach: I picked one panel at random, copied all its information except position and roation, and pasted it to all the other panels. this fixed them all. but i still don't know where the difference was. I mean, i am spoilering the part code in here for brevity, but the most likely suspects, the lines

 state = 0

 PreFailState = 0

efficiencyMult = 1

were the same for all the panels

Spoiler

PART
            {
                name = LgRadialSolarPanel
                cid = 4290417034
                uid = 1154942720
                mid = 4004678324
                persistentId = 64855651
                launchID = 68
                parent = 86
                position = -1.4000015258789063,-3.4000542163848877,-1.6000185012817383
                rotation = -0.923879623,-5.79847175E-08,0.382683516,-1.2655218E-09
                mirror = 1,1,1
                symMethod = Mirror
                istg = -1
                resPri = 0
                dstg = 0
                sqor = -1
                sepI = -1
                sidx = -1
                attm = 1
                sameVesselCollision = False
                sym = 92
                srfN = srfAttach, 86,truss1x
                mass = 0.0399999991
                shielded = False
                temp = 222.40614146267384
                tempExt = 222.33424505289219
                tempExtUnexp = 311.58995992672624
                staticPressureAtm = 0
                expt = 0.5
                state = 0
                PreFailState = 0
                attached = True
                autostrutMode = Off
                rigidAttachment = False
                flag = Squad/Flags/default
                rTrf = LgRadialSolarPanel
                modCost = 0
                EVENTS
                {
                }
                ACTIONS
                {
                    ToggleSameVesselInteraction
                    {
                        actionGroup = None
                        wasActiveBeforePartWasAdjusted = False
                    }
                    SetSameVesselInteraction
                    {
                        actionGroup = None
                        wasActiveBeforePartWasAdjusted = False
                    }
                    RemoveSameVesselInteraction
                    {
                        actionGroup = None
                        wasActiveBeforePartWasAdjusted = False
                    }
                }
                PARTDATA
                {
                }
                MODULE
                {
                    name = ModuleDeployableSolarPanel
                    isEnabled = True
                    efficiencyMult = 1
                    launchUT = 1277757.8259036217
                    currentRotation = (0, 0, 0, 1)
                    storedAnimationTime = 0
                    storedAnimationSpeed = 0
                    deployState = EXTENDED
                    stagingEnabled = True
                    EVENTS
                    {
                    }
                    ACTIONS
                    {
                        ExtendPanelsAction
                        {
                            actionGroup = None
                            active = False
                            wasActiveBeforePartWasAdjusted = False
                        }
                        ExtendAction
                        {
                            actionGroup = None
                            active = False
                            wasActiveBeforePartWasAdjusted = False
                        }
                        RetractAction
                        {
                            actionGroup = None
                            active = False
                            wasActiveBeforePartWasAdjusted = False
                        }
                    }
                    UPGRADESAPPLIED
                    {
                    }
                }
            }

 

[Zhetaan]

On 8/7/2020 at 6:26 PM, king of nowhere said:

actually, they don't.

other parts do. i have seen the "broken" status on some other parts, but not on those solar panels.

That's interesting; mine clearly do.  In lieu of a charge rate, they display, 'Broken!'  In fairness, I also run Kopernicus which uses its own solar panel code for purposes of pointing at multiple stars, so it's possible that the unequivocal message is a part of that code.  I'll have to check.

As to the code that you copied:

On 8/7/2020 at 6:26 PM, king of nowhere said:

                MODULE
                {
                    name = ModuleDeployableSolarPanel
                    isEnabled = True
                    efficiencyMult = 1
                    launchUT = 1277757.8259036217
                    currentRotation = (0, 0, 0, 1)
                    storedAnimationTime = 0
                    storedAnimationSpeed = 0
                    deployState = EXTENDED
                    stagingEnabled = True

 

deploystate = EXTENDED is the part that fixed the panels.

[kfsone]

I ended up here looking for the same solution, I'd launched a probe with 3 OKEB-45 Nautilus panels, and apparently two of them came off during warp while flying an unrelated vehicle elsewhere.

I sent an engineer up to recover them and try to reattach them but they were marked "BROKEN", so I had to fix them first. When I fixed them and attached them to my repair vehicle, they immediately broke again. And when I tried to attach them to the original vehicle, they immediately broke again.

So I used SFSEd to edit the save from before I recovered the first panel and changed the PART -> MODULE -> deployState to RETRACTED but I also noticed they were marked as "rigidAttachment".

Changing them to "rigidAttachment false" fixed the problem with them breaking on reattach; and if you don't want to have to repair them first: try "RETRACTED" instead of "EXTENDED".