Can you edit a craft in orbit?

[dodrian]

I've run a number of missions and have assembled quite a large space station in orbit. Unfortunately, the game now lags quite a lot whenever I switch to or approach the station.

There are a lot of parts which I needed to help me dock things together, but no longer need now that the space station is armed and fully operational (probe cores, rcs tanks and thrusters, battery packs, etc), and I bet if I could remove those it would cut the part count down considerably.

I've tried copying the vessel bit from the persistence file into a new craft file, but it wouldn't load in the SPH (I messed around with a few things to try and fix it, but wasn't very hopeful as the variables in the PART{} bit were different to what was in a simple ship save file). I've also tried editing the persistence file and deleting all the rcs blocks, but that just disappeared large chunks of the station. I tried searching the forums, but didn't come up with an answer either, but maybe I wasn't searching for the right thing.

Does anyone know of a way I could edit my station, either with a mod, a tool or a how-to persistence edit guide?

[Mr Shifty]

I've also tried editing the persistence file and deleting all the rcs blocks, but that just disappeared large chunks of the station.

Every part in the vessel, you'll note, has a parameter called "parent". The parameter has a number which describes the parent part of the current part. The parts are numbered in the order they appear in the VESSEL{} section, starting from 0. So, when you remove a PART{}, you mess the ordering up. You might be able to get around this by manually editing all of the "parent = xx" lines (e.g. if you delete the 5th part -- part number 4 --, you'd have to subtract 1 from all of the "parent = x" lines where x is 5 or above.)