Are solar panel base tiles made of magic?

[myxal]

Apparently, you can' move heat from or to the tiles themselves (the panel on the right had hot petroleum on it for while):

Hot petroleum using the panel base as a pool wall? No problem. (Nice to get 2 extra tiles of space for a power transformer tucked under the standard "M" array)

Panel sitting on top of magma? No problem.

Hot debris fell onto the panel? No problem, as long as the panel isn't exposed to any gas or liquid from above.

This made me think of airflow tiles, but the panel does in fact, block gasses.

 

Is this a bug? The wiki implies that hot debris should heat the panel up, and I would expect that the solar panel base would behave like a glass window tile for the purposes of heat transfer.

[sakura_sk]

Wiki may need updating.. I think solar panel behavior changed after MergeDown but I haven't researched it much to see how and how much. There was a point when solar panel let gases out (in EA Spaced Out) and another one when deconstructing them, left invisible cells where their base was. After several more fixes like these, they maybe changed from what they were before?

Your bottom panel seems to be heating a bit though so I'm not sure how "no problem" touching magma is considered.

[ghkbrew]

Solar panels are weird because they're actually made of vacuum:

But at the same time the base is still impermeable/solid.  This is why magma touching the base doesn't heat it up; there's nothing there to heat up. Most other solid buildings having a backing tile of their construction material which will exchange heat with adjacent tiles, transferring the heat to the building as well.  Remember buildings only exchange heat with tiles they occupy, not adjacent ones.  This is also why when you put hot liquid/gas on top of the panel it will heat up because the building does occupy those cells.

 Another quirk this causes is that radiation will pass through them completely unhindered. Which can be useful for mutant plant farms.  I haven't tried it but I would bet they're immune to pressure damage as well.  Solid vacuum is weird stuff.

13 hours ago, myxal said:

I would expect that the solar panel base would behave like a glass window tile for the purposes of heat transfer.

Like @sakura_sk said, I'm pretty sure solar panels had glass backing material pre-mergedown which was much more intuitive. I'm not entirely sure why it changed.

[degr]

As I know they did not exchange heat with debris

[SakuraKoi]

It's not Magic... It's Space Magic!

Well, as mentioned already, heat transfer is really weird and Solar Panels have that quirk. One can also keep contents of buildings at their temperature if they are in vacuum, ranging from Reservoirs over (Glass) Production to Pipes. I'm not sure though if Pipes in Solar Panel Bases also work for heat transfer is really weird. (Primarily to save processing power. Along with Gas Movement, Heat Transfer is the main resource hog... and we only operate with one core.)