What happened to my crew slots?

[hollyfeld]

Anyone know what could have happened to my orbital station's crew slots? The included screenshot shows one of the four parts with crew: Mk 1 Command Pod, Cupola, Mk 2 Lander Can, and an MPL. This is one of three orbital stations, and the other two do not show this problem. I have discovered that I can remove the crew (via crew hatches) for EVA, but then they can't go back in because the part is already full. Also, trying the Transfer button (as shown below) doesn't highlight any of the other crew parts as valid destinations. The last weird thing: If I disconnect the two pieces (simply joined by a standard Docking Port), I cannot turn on SAS (because "no pilot is on board"), but I do have complete control of the craft (see upper left of the image below) (because the vessel is "crewed"). By the way, I included a pilot in each of the launches that make up this orbital station.

It has been possibly about 1 yr (in-game) since I did anything with this station, so I don't know how long the problem has been present (i.e. what update might have caused it).

Speaking of updates, here's the listing of my GameData folder:

I am running KSP 1.11 (the current version, updated via Steam).

Nothing crashes, freezes, or explodes because of this problem; something just happened to change the crew slots on those four parts in that one orbital station to 0. Is there any way to repair these parts, or do I just have to send up new (empty) craft for the kerbals to transfer into?

[jimmymcgoochie]

Sounds like your save file has been slightly corrupted. If you’re feeling brave you can open (a copy of!) your save file in a text editor, find the affected station and fix the crew capacity values inside it; the safer and easier option is to build a second identical station in the VAB, cheat it into orbit beside the broken one, move the crew over to the new one, before cheating the old one back to the ground and recovering it.

One thing I will say- don’t put mods into the copy of KSP controlled by Steam. If you want to use mods, copy the entire KSP directory from steamapps/common and put it somewhere else before adding mods, this will prevent Steam from updating the modded save and potentially breaking your save because a mod was incompatible. You can have as many copies of KSP as you like on your PC, with different versions and different sets of mods (or none) in each, but leave the Steam copy unmodded to get game updates when they’re released.

[hollyfeld]

On 3/6/2021 at 1:53 AM, jimmymcgoochie said:

Sounds like your save file has been slightly corrupted. If you’re feeling brave you can open (a copy of!) your save file in a text editor, find the affected station and fix the crew capacity values inside it; the safer and easier option is to build a second identical station in the VAB, cheat it into orbit beside the broken one, move the crew over to the new one, before cheating the old one back to the ground and recovering it.

Thank you! I wound up using the text editor, but could you tell me more about how to "cheat it into orbit" in case I need to do that in the future? I've never looked into that before.

For anyone finding this post, I did find the problem in my save file. It was in the TweakScale module section of each of the offending crew parts on that vessel. (The "originalsizecrewcount" was set to 0.) Since that vessel was launched so long ago, the TweakScale mod had at least one update since those parts were generated which fixed that crew count mishap; I just never had any reason to try pulling those Kerbals out of their seats until now.

[jimmymcgoochie]

Alt+F12 (or escape > version information in the bottom right of the pause menu) > cheats > set orbit, you can set most of the parameters there and it’ll put your vessel where you said. There’s also a set position mode in (I think) 1.9 and later which can also put you at any co-ordinates and any altitude you like, though it’s best to be careful when moving to somewhere near the surface as you can accidentally end up underground, which caused many explosions and no more craft...