Interplanetary Orbital Units

There's no particular reason why solar panels even need the ability to go off on their own merry little adventures in deep space at the moment. Although at the moment they generate such a ridiculously huge amount of energy that it'd make more sense if the boosters just sent them into low orbits around the Sun. (Can has solar panel yield scale with distance from the Sun plz Uber?)

T1 energy: 1 metal gives you 1.33 energy per second
T2 energy: 1 metal gives you 1.85 energy per second
T3 energy: 1 metal gives you 1.45 energy per second

They're less efficient then t2 energy so not sure why you want to build them when you can't move them away from the planet anymore. Yeah, they're safeish in orbit (until an avenger comes along and kills it in 10 seconds) although the enemy has to find and target it which may be too annoying for them to do anyway.

They're zero-micro energy ramp that doesn't take up any space, with none of the pathfinding issues you get when trying to order a blob of construction vehicles to build masses of advanced pgens. Build an orbital launcher, set it to build a hundred solar panels and stick some guys assisting it and you can ignore it, while your advanced pgens need to be individually placed and get increasingly difficult to defend the more of them you have, and you'll have to keep coming back to make sure that half the workers haven't gotten stuck on some terrain feature and forgotten what they were supposed to be doing. Your solar panels, on the other hand can all be defended at once by your avenger blob. Or parked directly above a bunch of Umbrellas (when Umbrellas stop sucking, that is).

Landers shouldn't just be able to fly through deep space anyway. No satelite should. Landers should only be able to travel from astroid to astroid, moon to moon or planet to moon and back, but not from one side of the solar system to the other. You should have to use actual space-rockets for that. So you need an orbital launcher to leave the planet.
Just like in the visualization trailer! It looked awesome how the lander picked up the commander, then put him in the rocket and he was launched to the moon.
Then those three little landers picked up fabrication bots and got some asteroids to be used as KEWs.
Nothing should be able to stay between planets. Nothing. The space between planets should only be an area that is used for the rockets to fly through. Or other means of transportation with enough thrust to actually go anywhere.

This would also prevent commander hopping, since commanders can't just leave the planet they ran to when you get there, without an orbital launcher, and make "where do I send this rocket now" an even bigger decision.

EDIT: Alright, fabbers should also be allowed to be picked off by landers and put into a rocket, of course. Or perhaps a.. transport-rocket that's bigger and allows to take in a bunch of fabbers and a few other units. Or a huge lander-ship or something. We need ways to transport, yes, but none of htem should be able to stay between planets and none of the ones that can pick up a commander should be able to start without an orbital launch pad to prevent space-commanders.

Isent the whole point of orbital generators that you can move them from world to world? That is how i see them at least (So you dont have to start over your energy production if the planet your main base was on happened to be destroyed).

So they are not orbital units but spaceships now?

Essentially.

Yeah, any kind of interplanetary interceptor needs to just be a single shot warhead rather than a reusable unit.

I still think the lander should be moved to an air factory unit, and move around like a plane transporting units and perhaps comnapping (if it can get past the AA) but then you load it into the orbital launcher and fire it at another planet where it would land where you told it to but also would then require another orbital factory to be launched again I think this would solve the lander problems people are having plus it gives us a air transport that we can use to bypass islands and mountains with our units, If they then allowed it to carry every land unit and added a ferry system we would be able to transport armies over the water or flank a player that's using a mountain wall but has no defenses there :3

this!

This would make scouting more useful, might make mistakes trips more of a problem when travel takes so long.

This. You need to be able to move solar generators to avoid them getting shot down on hostile planets. They should have no view range of even orbital layer nor should they have radar so they are completely blind, and they shouldn't produce energy when planet hoping, but being able to flee from danger is useful for it. It produces a lot of power btw, it could be cost per power like the t2 but be useful for a high output and guaranteed to survive. It would even have a downside if it didn't produce between orbits.

This is why basic orbital radar should have limited radius cheap price earlier tier, orbital fighters should be earlier tier but more expensive than air and weaker than air but able to target air ground and orbital while all orbital units having low health since they are unattackable by most anyway, and orbital laser also being completely blind on its own, and the umbrella having the range of equal or little less than antinuke.

Those are things i would try. There is no reason something that cannot be attacked needs so much health, why orbital fighters need to be t3 multi and still have the orbital unattackability when they can be t2 cost with t1 strength and actually be the linking unit between the layers by shooting and receiving fire from all of them, and a cheap weak radar to planet scout with would be nice.

But how does that solar thingy get out of orbit? It doesn't seem like it got any thruster powerful enough. Protect your solar generators if you want them, don't let them be shot down.