Symmetry Question

[Lighthawk]

While building a ship/plane/rover/deathtrap, is it possible to attach a part with symmetry engaged, and then removal individual copies of said part without taking all of them off? For example, if I wanted to put something on in tri-symmetry and then take off the "top" part while leaving the other two on the "bottom"?

Edited November 25, 2013 by Lighthawk

[Taki117]

not possible, if you add parts in symmetry and then unset symmetry and remove part it removes all the parts.

[SSSPutnik]

Yeah I've wanted to do this often too.

[Dogface]

Workaround:

Put a "placeholder" part (tri-symmetry on), just about the where I want the desired part to sit. With Angle Snap on, place the desired parts just under the placeholders, then remove the placeholder part.

[Lighthawk]

That's actually a pretty good work around idea, thank you.

[Lighthawk]

Well sucks that it can't be done. But thanks for the work around idea Dogface, that's actually pretty clever.

[phunk]

Standard disclaimer: Backup your saves folder before you attempt this...

It can be done. Save the ship, exit ksp, edit the .craft file for that ship, and remove all of the "sym = " lines from the parts in question. Each of the symmetric parts will have a "sym = " line pointing to every other part it's symmetric with. So if you have 6 way symmetry, there will be 6 parts, each with 5 sym lines to remove. Start ksp and load up the ship again, and the parts will be exactly the same except no longer linked to each other via symmetry.

[Roxette]

... remove all of the "sym = " lines from the parts ...

Thanks for this idea. It's even easier to do it at a commandline prompt:

find /v "sym =" ship.craft > newship.craft

and then just edit out the filename lines at top line of the new file.

[phunk]

Thanks for this idea. It's even easier to do it at a commandline prompt:

find /v "sym =" ship.craft > newship.craft

and then just edit out the filename lines at top line of the new file.

I'm a unix guy so I didn't know windows find worked like that, thanks.

Just keep in mind, doing it with find will remove symmetry from all of the parts in the ship.

Also I'm not sure what would happen with the loader if you had two ships with the same name. So you may want to either replace ship.craft with newship.craft, or if you keep both, open newship and edit the first line to give it a unique name.

[Roxette]

The name is only used on the user interface side, ships have a unique reference set (I think at launch time) so you can have multiple ships in flight with the same name, which can make life interesting or confusing. I'm also a UNIX guy since SVR2 but I do more things from within wandows these days

[phunk]

True but they only have a unique Id after you've launched an instance of them. The problem is in the load/save functionality of the VAB. For example if you do the following:

1) Make a copy of ship.craft to newship.craft.

2) Load newship in the VAB.

3) Edit it and hit save.

Unless you modified the ship name before you saved, you've just overwritten the original ship.craft instead of newship.craft. The problem is that the loader dialog displays the filename, so you see newship in the list after simply copying the file. But the save button uses the ship name to chose the filename to save it to, and the ship name listed inside newship.craft is the same as the one in "ship.craft". So it's best when copying a craft file to also edit the name in the file to match the filename.