Save editing - Deleting a flight/ship and returning crew to KSC

[jarmund]

Short version: How do I edit my savefile to cancel a flight?

Longer version: I launched an interplanetary expedition, and I later installed a mod that I would like to include, part-wise, on that ship. It is too late for revert, as it is a mothership that was assembled during multiple launches, and it is well underway. What I want is to pretend the ship was never launched, by simply deleting it from the savegame, and magically having my kerbals (all 12 of them) be back at the space center.

Is there a relatively easy way of achieving this?

(I realized that having ~15 tonnes of food onboard is stupid, so I installed a greenhouse mod instead).

Edited June 3, 2015 by jarmund

[quietghost]

Deleting the ship is easy, it is the Kerbals that are the hard part.

First things first: make sure you have a backup quicksave.sfs file, so that any damaging changes are easily reverted.

Also I recommend you just use HyperEdit to bring your ship back to LKO, then retrieve those kerbals that way. But here are the steps to editing the save file/

Please read through these instructions in their entirety, so that you are prepared to handle all the steps.

You will need to keep track of all the kerbals that you will be moving.

Steps:

1. Find your ship in the save file by opening it in a capable text editor such as Notepad++ or gedit on linux. Use Ctrl+F to find you vessel name. The header of your vessel will look like the code snippet below

2. Delete the follows:

VESSEL
        {
            pid = b3c113e8efd8483ab60eb37a71bbdd90
            name = [Ship Name Goes Here]
            type = Ship
            sit = LANDED
            landed = True
            landedAt = 
            splashed = False
            met = 140124.970329955
            lct = 124075818.523473
            root = 0
            lat = -4.42956507922574
            lon = 288.699115981021
            alt = 1117.85894691315
            hgt = 1.095864
            nrm = 0.00524677,0.999986,0.0005325079
            rot = 0.6037621,0.5427328,-0.4667104,-0.3508469
            CoM = -3.109872E-05,1.614197,0.000536263
            stg = 2
            prst = False
            ref = 239007968
            ctrl = True
            cPch = 
            cHdg = 
            cMod = 0
            ...and so on for the next 5000+ lines, all the way until the code next says "VESSEL

3. Now look up the Kerbal roster in the save file, then look up the all the kerbals on that Ship in the roster. They will be marked as "Assigned"

KERBAL
        {
            name = Valentina Kerman
            gender = Female
            type = Crew
            brave = 0.55
            dumb = 0.4
            badS = True
            tour = False
            state = Assigned
            ToD = 0
            idx = 0

Change it to "Available" for all of them

4. Finally, there is the parameter "idx=##" for all of them. You are going to have to find the highest value for your already available kerbals. It may be 0, 3, or some higher number, but it will always be the number of available Kerbals - 1

In ascending fashion, you need to assign the "idx" value of all of them incrementally. It does not matter what order, so long as there are no repeats and no skips.

KERBAL
        {
            name = Valentina Kerman
            gender = Female
            type = Crew
            brave = 0.55
            dumb = 0.4
            badS = True
            tour = False
            state = Available
            ToD = 0
            idx = 3

idx set to 3, because I have Jeb, Bill and Bob available at the moment.

If the above steps do not work, then I must have missed something. The other option (much safer!!!) is to use HyperEdit to bring your ship into low Kerbin orbit and either bring them down safely to the surface or send a retrieval vessel to get them.

Hope that helped.

Edited June 2, 2015 by quietghost