First of all, I'm upset because there is no message (successful or error) indicating what happened with the retrofit order
. I've wasted 2 turns in a KotH game for the throne because I have to guess what the problem is because the game is not doing what it is supposed to do! Games like these have little tolerance for wasting time.
As to the problem being the 50% rule, the total size of the ship is 8000m, 400o, and 500r. Adding 2 panels had a cost of 2000m and 500r. Thinking rads might be causing the retrofiting problem, I wasted another turn telling it to retrofit to add 1 panel (cost 1000m and 250r...exactly half the existing rad size of the ship) but that failed with no message whatsoever.
I'm sure I've retrofitted bases before--the most recent game being Geo's 10-homeworld Dimension game so they CAN be retrofitted while mining.
Also, in the past, when I've exceeded the 50% rule (or didn't have enough resources in storage), I've gotten an error message.
[edit] - Actually, the time I tried to add a single panel, it was an org extractor and its cost was 1000m, 100o, and 100r. That's LESS THAN HALF the size of any category of materials and it failed.