Getting the ship file for an already launched ship?

[doubleg]

I have a ship that I've launched that for some reason doesn't appear in my VAB menu (I swore I saved it, but I guess not). The auto-save ship has long been overwritten since I've done a number of missions since, but the upper part of the ship is still in my game and is on it's way towards Kerbin escape is there any simple way to easily recover that ship file? I'd really rather not re-build this one since it's a ship with over 9000 m/s (after establishing LKO) which is accomplished mostly through ridiculous amounts of asparagus staging.

[SRV Ron]

If you know what date you saved it, you might be able to find the craft file in your ships Save folder using the date search function. If not, it is going to be part of your persistent.sfs file in your save folder which is written in unicode. Use Wordpad to read the file.

I haven't had the chance to compare the structure of the sfs file to that of a craft file. A quick glance shows that it contains the craft file for ships in flight and craft files for the debre left in space from those ships as well as info about the location, speed and other info the game needs to track them in flight.

Edited September 11, 2013 by SRV Ron

[aaraujo]

Main issue with the persistent file is that the craft information saved in the persistent file can't just be copied and pasted into a craft file... won't work... I am currently working on a utility that will regenerate the craft file from a ship in the persistent file, but it's not finished yet.

I've managed to parse out the entire persistent file into a memory structure so I have something like this:

VESSEL

|

+---> PART

|

+---> PART

|

.

.

.

I just now need to rebuild the part names and connections (which are nuked in the persistent file). So far, part names don't seem to be an issue, connections isn't looking so good...