What do you mean?... Blocked?...

[Muskiet]

I went to the Mun today with my little "bus", solar panels fully extended, sun dead ahead shining its glorious rays onto them and ended up with a dead battery anyways.

I mean... seriously!?

[SpaceSphereOfDeath]

Rotate it 90' side ways, you apparently have RCS

[Kasuha]

Solar panels use only one point to check whether they receive sun or are blocked. And in this case the point is apparently at the base of the solar panel.

[Luckless]

Solar panels use only one point to check whether they receive sun or are blocked. And in this case the point is apparently at the base of the solar panel.

That should probably be moved to the centre or the far edge. Ideally I would say ray-trace from three points on each sub-panel to see if it has a sight line to the sun and then calculate the angle of the panel as a whole in a single check.

[LameLefty]

Solar panels use only one point to check whether they receive sun or are blocked. And in this case the point is apparently at the base of the solar panel.

That should probably be moved to the centre or the far edge. Ideally I would say ray-trace from three points on each sub-panel to see if it has a sight line to the sun and then calculate the angle of the panel as a whole in a single check.

I ran into this bug just the other day. My ship had spent too long with its x-axis aligned pointing to the sun. My ship went completely dead before I realized what had happened, despite the vast majority of each of 4 panels reflecting bright sunlight just fine.

[Rhyunix]

Flip the ship around, so they rotate- strange bug though

[LameLefty]

Flip the ship around, so they rotate- strange bug though

You can't always do that; if your ship has NO electricity you cannot use reaction wheels, and if there's no crew to EVA and push it around using jetpacks, you're just stuck with a dead ship.

[Kasuha]

You can't always do that; if your ship has NO electricity you cannot use reaction wheels, and if there's no crew to EVA and push it around using jetpacks, you're just stuck with a dead ship.

If it has solar panels deployed, it will eventually get into an angle where sun lights onto the panel even without any rotation.

As long as you can afford to wait long enough for your SOI center to travel sufficient angle around the Sun.

[Bobnova]

I scatter some of the little always-open panels around the ship on various edges for just this reason. And so the ship doesn't die if I forget to open the main panels.

[Muskiet]

Rotate it 90' side ways, you apparently have RCS

Unfortunately without power I wasn't able to do that either.

If it has solar panels deployed, it will eventually get into an angle where sun lights onto the panel even without any rotation.

Unfortunately this is an empty bus. No crew to push the thing around (I like that solution though, didn't think about that) and the point where I figured out this thing is dead was right as it entered the Mun's influence and want to schedule an orbit burn. I wasn't able to do that burn before I was far passed the Mun so my bus would have been stuck in a big orbit around Kerbin. I did find a workaround though. Overnight I left the ship flying and in the morning I hit F9 to reload the moment I entered the Mun's influence and for some reason it loaded it with the Sun at a different angle and my batteries fully charged!