Parts & Vessels "Part Ineffective" spam for solar panels

[qwery123]

Reported Version: v0.2.0 (latest) | Mods: none | Can replicate without mods? Yes 
OS: Windows 11 | CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 5600G with Radeon Graphics (12) | GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 (8032MB) | RAM: 16GB

 

Solar panels which are in a shadow sometimes generate messages that they do not receive enough sunlight every few seconds. Those messages are visible even if I am in a KSC facility (only confirmed for Mission Control)

How to reproduce:

1. Build a probe consisting of a HECS remote guidance unit with OX-STAT solar panels in 6-symmetry.

2. Put it in orbit around Mun (not sure if this step is necessary, but I started receiving those messages when I entered orbit around Mun)

3. Notice the spam about that the solar panels receive too little stellar light.

I think that these notifications should be put into the part manager instead of being pop-up-like notifications visible even from other places.

Edited December 19, 2023 by The Space Peacock

[jclovis3]

Agreed. The user should understand that solar panels are subject to day / night restrictions and expect there to be periods of lost power. They don't need to be told every time this happens on every craft. Should the loss of power interrupt thrust on EC driven engines, that would make sense, but not for everything else. Maybe only the active craft should produce these warnings, including when you are in the tracking station while remaining under control of a craft (when you switch to the tracking station from the flight screen).

In the future, many things will be driven by power and face interruptions. Fuel generation in KSP1 would run when there was power, and pause when there wasn't. Because resuming required you to not be in time warp, you had to monitor it and restart it manually each cycle. While you were not in control of the vehicle and not within the "physics bubble" of that vehicle, you would receive continuous production at a reduced rate, I think because it slowed up in time warp. I understand that KSP2 strives to track solar exposure for all craft all the time, and I'm down with that but it should not come at a cost of message spam.

In this instance, I have craft that either landed or crashed near a monument (mostly drones, but one with a pilot), that I leave in place so that I can go back and view the monument at any time since they are not kept in the tracking station under a special category. I can see why we can't "take control" of flags from the tracking station and thus there is no reason to list them but now they are like debris and we can't even target them to land near them and read them. So leaving a controllable drone is the only way we have currently to contently keep an eye on a monument. Static screen shots don't capture how it looks from all angles of sunlight exposure or from all angles around the monument.

While one workaround might be to close expandable solar panels to stop the notifications, there are some that don't collapse or never could expand in the first place and we may not want to totally cut off all power, especially if we know the craft has sufficient battery life to get through the night. A warning about EC running out may be a better solution than notifications that solar exposure was missing.

Edited January 6 by jclovis3
Added context and suggestions.

[RalphKerman]

I have had this issue from the very beginning of KSP 2.

Please consider an option to turn off these warnings (maybe make them part of the "new player experience" so you don't even have to implement a new option switch ?). But for anyone who has played the game for a little while and has learnt that solar panels won't produce EC in the dark this message spam becomes very annoying and distracting.

The same should apply to any kind of message that state obvious things, please make these messages optional with some sort of configuration option to turn them off entirely (or maybe a kind of "message level" option with "all" / "verbose", "critical only" and "none" as values?). Or (the deluxe version) make it an attribute of parts (with default = "off"!) so you can configure a part to show more messages if you think this part is vital and needs to be monitored (but this solution exceeds what KSP 1 had so I consider it a non-priority and deluxe version into which I would not put too much development time) you can switch it on and only for this part you will get a message.