I appreciate the rambling though, thanks. 😉

In the establishing shot the sun is shining mostly on the weapon side where we don’t see any intakes. The planet goes dark when the sun is drained, so we’ll have to assume that the sun shining on the base is also the one being drained and that it can be drained from that angle.

So here’s what I think. The positions of the gun and the intakes are fixed. But there might be many small intakes spread out across the surface. The intakes can also be tilted and take in the sun energy at an angle. I assume the sun beam can bend a bit as well. First of all the gun is pointed at the target (by moving the planet around somehow), and the sun is drained through one or several intakes that are the closest ones to the sun being drained.

So perhaps we should see a beam from the sun that goes behind the planet on the side where the sun shines.

Here’s a look at a charging port. There are mountains around it, and we see a small outpost with TIE fighters on the left side which indicate the scale of the thing, it’s big but probably not big enough to be clearly visible from space. I’m guessing about 200 meters in diameter, maybe? It’s also angled a bit.

Here’s a shot of what the draining looks like from the surface, the beam seems to be angled relative to the surface of the planet. It looks like the beam goes into a single spot.

In this map we don’t see any big charging holes, but there are many circular things on the surface, perhaps some of them could be charging holes? We can also see a line across the side of the planet that seems to separate it into a front half and a back half, I wonder if this could suggest that the back is different and maybe that’s where the charging happens? There also seems to be some sort of structure on the bottom of the planet, could that be related to the charging? Perhaps it charges from the top and/or bottom?

Another wiew of the back of the planet, nothing visible there though…

No visible charging holes here, unless they’re the black dots in the middle of the hexagon patterns.

A view of a screen suggesting that the sun beam enters the top or bottom of the planet, not sure how accurate this is though as the graphics need to be simplified to some extent.

Here’s a piece of concept art showing many massive charging holes, this might be a hint.