Is it possible to make a .craft file from a ship in the .sfs file?

[Caligari]

I have just accidentally overwritten the .craft file of a 300 piece rover that took me the better part of 2 days to make, but it's still sitting next to the runway on Kerbin. Is there a way to copy the craft as it is in the world's save and create a .craft file from it? I've found the data for the craft itself; maybe I could trick the game into making it an auto saved ship and fix it that way? Let me know if you have any information on this please!

Edited April 22, 2016 by Caligari
Fixed a grammatical error

[Plusck]

There was a longish thread about this last year:

And it seems that @Claw and others made tools for this purpose - but they don't work in 1.0.5 ...

I'm sure there was a more recent thread on this subject, but I can't find it.

From what I remember of dicussions here, the answer is "yes it's possible" but it's a pain because of the changes the game makes to the ship to convert it from an editable structure to a working entity. With a monster of a ship like yours, reversing those changes manually would be a herculean task.

Another thread with a tool that might help you in this endeavour:

 

Finally, I don't think there is a difference between the "autosaved" ship and the craft file - so if you can extract the rover's info and make it craft-like, you might as well just save it as one.

[Caligari]

Yeah, there seems to be no difference between a standard .craft and the autosaved one, but I can't trick the game into "autosaving" the ship; I've just started remaking it.

I see what you mean about the changes the game makes, and I've figured that it'd likely take me longer to try and edit the files than to just rebuild the craft.

 Oh well, thanks for the help!

[Plusck]

I wouldn't give up quite yet : D   Somebody with first-hand experience of the problem may well come along with a more up-to-date solution.

And you could still try Claw's tool - or tweak it if you can see where there are any problems...

[Claw]

13 minutes ago, Plusck said:

And you could still try Claw's tool - or tweak it if you can see where there are any problems...

It's currently not working in 1.1 (or 1.0.5), but I plan on updating it. It might still be a rough product (as it was) but enough for people to rescue their ships.

Keep an eye on my bug fix thread for an update sometime this weekend.

[Mythos]

@Plusck Thanks for mentioning my tool.

I hope it could help to understand the complexity of such a task. Of course it would be nice, if a tool could do it, but .craft files are really different from .sfs files as you may have seen. It would take a lot of sparetime to develop such a feature.

Edited April 23, 2016 by Mythos