Ships lose Station/Base contract validity after load

[Darth Pseudonym]

When I load a game, sometimes -- not always, but sometimes -- the game seems to forget which ships were built after I accepted a station/base contract.  When I first launched the ship, the "Build a new station that has an antenna, a docking port, and can generate power" requirement was checked, but after several reloads, it mysteriously goes away, and I can't get it to come back on.  The vessel clearly has a the three parts needed, so it has to be that the game thinks the ship is older than the contract.

I haven't been able to identify what specific scenario makes this happen, but it's making it virtually impossible to complete complex station contracts without the cheat menu.

Has anyone else seen this happen?  Any advice?

[Superfluous J]

Do you do a lot of docking, for refueling or tugboats or whatnot?

There has been a long standing problem with docking things together, where an older ship will "infect" a newer ship with the older ship's time stamp. It's never been recreatable from my knowledge (I for example don't think I've ever seen it happen to me) so there's nothing the devs can do to fix it.

[Darth Pseudonym]

The only docking I've done on this particular ship is with things newer than it -- I launched an interplanetary drive section, then a crew cabin section, and at some point after docking, the ship became invalid as a station.  But what's weird is I can go back to a quicksave I created earlier, and it still shows the ship as being unqualified.

ETA: Oh, hang on, there is one thing.  I used an engineer to glue an external seat to the thing, and that seat came from a ship I launched prior to the contract.  I bet that's what did it.

ETA again: I unglued the offending chair and the ship returned to being considered 'new'.  So that's a thing.

Edited January 28, 2021 by Darth Pseudonym