Gathering energy from empty void however is. Thus solar panels are not plausible means of gathering energy in Aurora.
just playing devil's advocate here:
the real limitation is not actually the size of the solar panels, it's the size that intercepts light decreasing in intensity by the square of the distance to the sun. you can increase the energy you take in in two ways, by increasing the size of the panel (vastly, for practical effect) or increasing the proximity of the ship to the sun (vastly again)
now, I dropped out of my college physics program because I have the mathematical abilities of a 7-year-old, but I think you'd get a pretty sizable power boost if you opened up a building-sized solar panel very, very close to the sun...like if you ship was parked right over it.
and obviously we could never build something like this using normal physics, but transnewtonian materials? They might just work for that. Transnewtonian physics makes solar power like this practical because it allows greater proximity to the sun, not more efficient solar panels.
I don't like it as a game mechanic though, simply because these ships really don't run on "energy" in the conventional sense. I don't care how much nuclear fuel or fusion stuff you're towing...no ship that weighs 20,000 tons is going 6,000 kps in any sane amount of time. It's not acceleration due to added energy...it's some kind of spacebending flux-charged field, maintained by flux capacitors of course, that uses the tachyon annihilation in the hyperfine interactions of sorium nuclei.
I think that's how it works anyway. You'd have to ask steve. Like I said, I dropped out of my college physics program, long before the classes we took on Sorium. I recall one professor saying that Corbomite was a deadly explosive, but as I understand it, opinions are divided on that.
