I'm probably way too late to the party to talk about solar panels in this thread considering by the looks of things it's probably been done to death.
But here's the thing - Please don't take this the wrong way.
Regardless of what you do with solar panels to make them
more- sorry,
even more of a challenge is that unless you do something that requires manual labor - for example; whacking a magmatic engine with a crescenthammer; you will be hard struck to find a method which actually makes life harder for the player. I'm going to take your example of replacing the carbon plates every now and then as an example first, this isn't exactly hard to accomidate, consdering all you need to is whip up a setup that automates the construction of a plate and applies it to the solar panel when needed, if it indeed uses the setup of having a carbon plate with a damage value in a slot.
This begs the following questions:
- Do carbon plates no longer stack?
- Do they stack until they have a damage value?
- Can you simply pump them in with a pipe?
- How long do Carbon Plates last?
- Do you have to do it by hand?
- Can you retrieve carbon plates once placed inside?
- Can you use multiple at a time?
The list goes on...
Then we have your dust solution... Now this to me could be more like the crescent hammer if done right, say if the texture of the top of the solar panel starts to degrade until you wipe it down with a tool that degrades with use.
Or - You simply have yet another slot that accumulates dust build up which can be simply pumped out into a void pipe.
Assuming you go with the former, better option, there's more questions.
- How many uses does this "tool" have?
- How expensive would it be to make this tool? Is it worth making it? Can it be charged with EU?
- How long does it take for dust to accumulate? Is it too rapid?
- Considering the ass of a time I went through to build this machine, is it worth it anymore now that this is imposed?
- Can this feature be turned off and on in the config?
- How drastic are the drops in power output with each level of degradation?
- Can it be automated? (By using a deployer with the tool inside or a turtle, for example?) If so how easy would it be to do so? Is it worth it?
The point is, like it or not the solar panel is and always will be a powerful piece of kit no matter how hard you try to put people off making it. Unless you seriously nerf or "balance" it's power output, you won't find an easy solution to make it harder to use because people, especially when there's other mods present, will always find a way to make it easier, and thus,
people will always whine that it's too easy to use.
Food for thought.
