How do I remove a KAS winch from an existing station?

[CorruptDB]

I am trying to remove a KAS winch (actually 2 winches) from a space station. I love KAS but the phantom physics involved when a winch is installed is killing me, my station starts spinning like a top making it undockable. I tried editing persistence.sfs to remove the PART entry for the winch but when I do that the whole station below the point of the winch disappears. I had assumed that the parts are in a parent-child tree and the winch shouldn't have any children but obviously I missed something.

If I hook the connector to a fast ship and thrust hard for the 100m of slack is it likely to pull the winch off the station or it is more likely to break the connector off the winch? I would like to get these off without damaging the station, but a little damage would be preferable to deorbiting it. Anybody have any suggestions to make this happen?

[Captain Sierra]

If you have good aim, you could take if off with whack-a-kerbal. are the winches on a separate module from the core? If so, you could just de-orbit that one section and send it back up without the winch. That would work so long as it isn't the core part and you happen to have a tug handy.

KAS winches only have 50m of slack but your idea might work.

As for file editing, are you using the inline one or the non-inline one? IN the latter case, make sure you get the winch, connector, and any attachment it might be on (grappling hook, electromagnet, etc.).

[CorruptDB]

It's a non-inline winch, I think it is called the vertical stack winch in the VAB. It is hooked to one of the nodes on the standard 6 node connector. The only thing it should have attached to it are the connector (which I also removed from the file) and a couple of struts. If the file layout is a tree it should be the second to last thing (connector being last) on that branch so I have no idea why the rest of the station would depend in it being there.

[CorruptDB]

Oh, and regarding the 50m vs 100m of slack, I was envisioning being all the way taut on one side then thrusting the opposite direction (passing near the winch in the middle of the burn) so 100m total.

[Starwaster]

I am trying to remove a KAS winch (actually 2 winches) from a space station. I love KAS but the phantom physics involved when a winch is installed is killing me, my station starts spinning like a top making it undockable. I tried editing persistence.sfs to remove the PART entry for the winch but when I do that the whole station below the point of the winch disappears. I had assumed that the parts are in a parent-child tree and the winch shouldn't have any children but obviously I missed something.

If I hook the connector to a fast ship and thrust hard for the 100m of slack is it likely to pull the winch off the station or it is more likely to break the connector off the winch? I would like to get these off without damaging the station, but a little damage would be preferable to deorbiting it. Anybody have any suggestions to make this happen?

Pretty sure the connector will give way before the winch, or maybe neither will.

Only options I see are to smack it off with something heavy. Bring something alongside like maybe a big orange tank with some reaction wheels and a remote control unit then line it up and pitch forwards or backwards and just smack that sucker off.

Other option is go back to editing the persistence file but instead of deleting the part, change it to something else. (and be sure to delete the modules on the part so that it stops thinking it's a winch)

The reason why it failed is probably something like this:

srfN = None, -1
attN = top, 1
attN = bottom, 3

I'm not 100% certain but I believe that the last digit indicates the the part number on the vessel. By outright removing a part you changed the ordinal position of every part after it. In the above example, this happens to be part #2 (first part is #0 btw) and part #1 is attached above. Part #3 is attached below.

Lets say your winch was part #13. The part that it's attached to would have one of the nodes having the #13 at the end. Say you had it attached to one of those adapters that lets you surface mount (winches aren't surface mountable are they?) The adapter piece might say something like attN = top, 13. But you deleted it so now something else is #13 and it confuses the hell out of KSP because basically everything after a certain point can't be logically connected in the way that they say they are. Make sense? You'd have to go through and re-number everything with no margin for error.

Edit: actually I lied, I am certain that's how it works.

[CorruptDB]

Thanks a ton for the detailed answer Starwaster. I just didn't know how the program related the parts to each other. I was able to change my winches and connectors into cubic struts and was finally able to get my tanker docked with the station.

[Starwaster]

Thanks a ton for the detailed answer Starwaster. I just didn't know how the program related the parts to each other. I was able to change my winches and connectors into cubic struts and was finally able to get my tanker docked with the station.

No problem!

[Tiron]

Hrm, I've removed parts from craft in flight before without any problems. The key thing is to make sure you get ALL the references to it. I don't know what it does if you fail to do so in the save file itself, but if you miss a reference in a .craft file it screws the game up something fierce when you try to load it.

The key thing here is that the link system works by putting a reference to the link on BOTH SIDES of the link. So the winch contains a reference to the connector, the connect contains a reference to the winch, the winch contains a reference to whatever it's attached to, and whatever it's attached to has a reference to the winch. The VAB really, really hates dangling references (it actually locks the edit up and you have to force close the game), and I can't imagine the actual game handles them any better.

You'd have to get anything that was radially attached to the winch too, and all the references to that as well. The connector, at minimum.

Barring that, heck, I don't know...it always worked for me.