How many solar panels do you need in Moon Sweepers

For daytime only, one chamber and one press (28 kW together) need 2 Solar Trackers, or 4 Solar Twins, or 10 Solar Posts. The Trackers cost $600, the Twins $600, the Posts $750. A full 1 chamber, 2 press build (46 kW) needs 3 Trackers ($900). Those are nominal sums of published peak figures at full sun. Night is different: output falls to zero, the length of the night is not published, and the capacity of the only dedicated battery is unknown.

The Tracker is the cheapest per peak kilowatt and the only one that follows the sun. It also carries the largest built-in battery. The Post has no battery at all, which matters at night. The sources do not explain what the listed range means in practice, so check the placement in game before relying on it.

These totals use machine power from the community databases. The consumption of the Packager, Splitter, Merger, Garage, Capsule Catcher and robot docks is not published, so they are not in the table. A real base draws more than the production machines alone.

• Solar output drops to 0 at night (a community power guide). The length of day and night is not published.
• The Twin stores 4 kWh and the Tracker 10 kWh. For a 10 minute night at 28 kW, the engine sizes 3 Trackers or 6 Twins (scenario: 30 minute day, 92% charge efficiency assumed).
• A Battery Bank is listed at 160 by two databases but with no capacity. One guide denies that a standalone battery exists. Foundry treats its capacity as unknown, never as zero.
• A search snippet claims machines stop below 8% of required power. Only one low-confidence source says so.

To give you an answer anyway, the planner asks for a night length in minutes, a day length (the default scenario uses 30 minutes) and a charge efficiency (an assumed 92%). Those three are your scenario inputs, not game facts, and results that depend on them are labelled as assumptions.

Daytime sizing is simple: the number of panels is the load divided by the peak output of one panel, rounded up. If you enter a night, the engine adds two checks. First, the daytime panels must also recharge what the night will use, so the load is multiplied by 1 plus the night length divided by the day length and the charge efficiency. Second, the energy needed at night, which is the load times the night length in hours, must fit in the panels’ built-in batteries. The larger of the two panel counts wins. A Solar Post has no battery, so with a night it can never cover the storage need alone, and the table says so instead of showing a number.

Because the day length, night length and charge efficiency are all unpublished, two players with different assumptions will get different answers from the same tool. That is the honest outcome with today’s data. When a source publishes the real cycle, the three inputs become fixed data and the guess disappears.

One third-party guide says each Chamber needs 2 Trackers and each Press 3. Against the published nominal figures that would be 2 x 16 = 32 kW for a 10 kW chamber and 48 kW for a 18 kW press, which does not line up. It may include a night margin or a different build, and it is a single low-confidence source. We list it in Data and sources and do not use it.