I wanted to ask if it was possible for the ion cannons to be straped to a spaceship and transported to another planet,
so that it could change orbits.

Ion cannons are installed in the orbit of the planet and cannot be removed once they have been installed.

Edit: [code snippits redacted]

While allowing you to recover the items, it introduced free duplication issues.

I disapprove of this change. It leads to unexpected behavior.
Ion cannons cannot technically be removed. That feature never existed and there is no code for it.
Yes, with your changes, you can cheat a new starter pack, but the ion cannon will still remain installed in orbit, because there is no code that removes it.

If you’re willing to spend the time and provide code to completely and cleanly remove ion cannons from orbit, I’ll add it with a settings option.
But I can't accept code with incomplete behavior that only creates the illusion of a function that doesn't exist.

Yeah, after playing with that in my personal patch mod for a bit it does have the issues you mention and I don't recommend using it either.

It would need to listen for the destroyed/removed events (as well as any platform movement related events) to update the local OIC table/count.