Blazemod has a bunch of “turreted solar panels”, which were supposed to be mounted on turret frames to let them track the sun and be slightly more efficient. However, the TURRET_FRAME/TURRET flags didn’t exist at the time, so blazemod turrets are indicated by BATTERY_MOUNT, and people can install turreted solar panels on storage battery mounts, which is weird and confusing.
As part of my work to add descriptions in-game to all vehicle parts so that people don’t have to use the forums/reddit to figure out vehicles, I would like to fix this stuff from blazemod.
I see three possible solutions:
1: migrate the xsolar_panel series to the standard solar panel series. They don’t produce any additional power anymore anyway, so this would just get rid of some weirdness.
2. redefine the xsolar_panel series to use TURRET and TURRET_FRAME. This would require some code changes, because parts with the TURRET flag have to be guns and can be used to fire from the vehicle controls menu.
3. do both: migrate the existing xsolar_panel series back to standard, and then add a new turret_solar_panel that uses a new ROTATE flag that requires that the part mount on a TURRET but means the part isn’t a weapon.
Short term, I’m probably going to do #1, and then implement the ROTATE flag later. But if a bunch of people really think turreted solar panels are something that should exist in blazemod, I’ll implement the ROTATE flag earlier.