Help Saving My Craft

[Madauhcip]

I made a cool plane and forgot to save it. I then launched it. I made a new plane, and then realized I forgot to save the first plane. I have a quicksave back to before plane #2 was created, but it is still auto-saved. Can I recover plane #1?

[Snark]

 

1 hour ago, Madauhcip said:

Can I recover plane #1?

There are a few answers, depending on how adventurous you are:

1. No.
2. Maybe #1.
3. Maybe #2.

The "no" answer:  Craft files are saved separately from the game file itself.  Doing a save-game only saves the ships that are in flight, not the design in the VAB or SPH.  So it's just gone.

The "maybe #1" answer:  Check the SPH, see if it might be listed there under "Auto-saved Ship".  If you've since launched another ship, though, I suspect that's gone, now, so you'd be out of luck.

The "maybe #2" answer:  A "ship in flight" isn't the same as "ship in SPH or VAB" ... but it's pretty similar.  I seem to recall that someone, somewhere, made some tool that could extract craft from a save file and write them as a .craft file that you can bring into the editor.  I've never used it, though, so I don't know how easy it is to use.  Nor do I recall who wrote it, or what the name of the tool was.  Nor do I know whether it's been kept up-to-date across KSP versions and still works.

So, unless some helpful person chimes in here and provides all the necessary info all nicely gift-wrapped for us... maybe easier just to re-build the plane. 

(And get in the knee-jerk habit of always, always saving the plane before launching.)

 

[Madauhcip]

11 minutes ago, Snark said:

 

(And get in the knee-jerk habit of always, always saving the plane before launching.)

 

I used to.....then my SPH got so full that I started to test planes before saving them.

[bewing]

I think enceos has your answer here: 

 

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

I haven't tried this, but the folks that created Hyperedit, also created Craft Kitchen, which, among other things, is said to be able to "extract" a ship that is flying and save it to a .craft file.

http://www.kerbaltek.com/craftkitchen