How to edit save files to remove parts from ship?

[Soda Popinski]

I've got an issue with my saved game from 0.22 in the new 0.23 version. Every time I undock my ship, the undocked ship goes off in a strange direction, and if I switch to it, it explodes and everyone on it dies. I only have ships in orbit around Kerbin and Duna, and this only happens with the Duna ship. Anyways, I've got mods installed and tried removing each one, but ran into the problem of the ship not loading because the parts are missing.

So, I want to edit the saved game file to remove these parts (scanning antennas from ScanSat and the hard drive thingy from Engineer Redux), so I can load up the game without the ships evaporating. Any instructions on this?

[Taki117]

What you are going to want to do is open up the part config for the part you are looking for and find the name of the part (Not the title, just the name) then you are going to want to open up your quicksave (Or persistant, but with quicksave it's easier to correct a mistake) then you are going to want to delete ALL references to that part (Not just the one on your ship)

[Blue]

Are any parts rooted from the parts you wish to remove? If there are, those parts will break if you try to delete the root.

[Soda Popinski]

What you are going to want to do is open up the part config for the part you are looking for and find the name of the part (Not the title, just the name) then you are going to want to open up your quicksave (Or persistant, but with quicksave it's easier to correct a mistake) then you are going to want to delete ALL references to that part (Not just the one on your ship)

Any chance I could get an example of what this may look like?

Looking through the quick save file (no access right now), I see a lot of things in "{ }"

From the little programming I remember, that usually implies everything within those 2 brackets are a single "unit." Should I just delete the whole thing, brackets and all, that contain the offending part?

Note: All these parts are extremities, so as far as I know, not rooted.

[DMagic]

This can be very tricky to do. Each part in the craft is numbered, so deleting one part will affect the numbers assigned to every part that comes after it. Unless you are deleting the last part (the one with the highest number) you will probably end up with lots of issues.

I did this once with some decouplers that were put on backwards. I didn't want those parts sticking out of the end of my Mun base so I tried to delete them. I managed to do it, but I had to renumber about 50 or so parts, and fix all of the connection references (each part labels the number of the parts connected to it).

It's not very fun.

If you want to try it the parameters that need changing are all at the beginning of each part's entry in the quicksave file.

To find what you need, first open the search box and type the name of your craft, that should bring you down to the right entry (it should say "vessel = *your name*", or something like that), though you sometimes end up with debris having similar names.

Each part is then listed in order by name. It should be something like Part {*part name* then a bunch of stuff}. You can try just deleting the parts in question, but if that breaks things you'll have to deal with the part numbers. The entries for those are the "parent" entries, as well as the "node_stack" entries, struts and docking ports are more complicated still.

Edited December 18, 2013 by DMagic

[Soda Popinski]

I'll probably load up 0.22, undock every part I can until I get to the barebones for the final undock. Import that quicksave to 0.23, and edit out the last 1 or 2 offending parts, then see if the Kraken still tears my ship apart with and without mods installed.

[Soda Popinski]

Didn't work. Once I deleted a part, when I loaded up the ship, everything except two large docking nodes dissappeared (with nothing in between them - yet rigidly connected). Orbit view still showed the vessel having 72 parts, oddly enough. Couldn't do anything at that point. Guess I'll just finish the mission in 0.22.

[Kasuha]

Removing a part to which nothing else was connected (leaf part) was always successful for me. Once the part is inside the ship structure or something is connected to it (e.g. a strut), problems appear and I never did serious attempt to remove such part. It might be possible to replace it by another part, though.

It is also possible to build equal craft without these parts, deploy it on launchpad (perhaps in another save), then overwrite the old ship by the new one (preserving important attributes such as position or orbital parameters, eventually also crew and fuel levels).

[phunk]

I wrote a perl script that removes parts and renumbers the rest. It's not really ready for the general public and I haven't tested it with .23 yet though. If you want to post your persistent.sfs file and let me know what part to remove, I can try.

[Soda Popinski]

I wrote a perl script that removes parts and renumbers the rest. It's not really ready for the general public and I haven't tested it with .23 yet though. If you want to post your persistent.sfs file and let me know what part to remove, I can try.

Thanks! I'll put up a link when I get home.

[Soda Popinski]

Sent you a PM with the link.

[John FX]

I wrote a perl script that removes parts and renumbers the rest. It's not really ready for the general public and I haven't tested it with .23 yet though. If you want to post your persistent.sfs file and let me know what part to remove, I can try.

At some point, when it is ready, that would be a useful script for the community. I can imagine it being very popular.

[The Griffin]

At some point, when it is ready, that would be a useful script for the community. I can imagine it being very popular.

Yes it would. How do I find it?

[Red Iron Crown]

Yes it would. How do I find it?

This is an old thread that you've bumped, but it is still relevant. You might be interested to try a new Java tool made by Nicate that makes removing parts from craft in saves much easier.

[csx23]

This is an old thread that you've bumped, but it is still relevant. You might be interested to try a new Java tool made by Nicate that makes removing parts from craft in saves much easier.

Thanks a lot, lifesaver that utility is!

[ctbram]

I manually aded bettercrewassignment to my games folder and created a excrements ton of ships.   There was a bug so I REMOVED bettercrewassignment from games.

Now all my saved ships poodle about missing modules: ModuleCrewAssignment and ModuleCrewREquirement.

Is there a safe way to remove all these modules from my saved ships? I don't want to build them all over and I am not sure about ships in my persistent.cfg and quicksave.cfg files.  I don't want to screw those files up.  I have already had to restart my career six loveing times now and I am ready to just quit ksp and not use any mods anymore.  

There has to be a mm script or something that can purge all these modules from my saved ships at least.

[Lisias]

There's nothing you need to do. By insisting on loading the craft, these modules will just be ripped out, reaching the same result as manually edition the crafts.

Just load them normally, ignoring the message.

Please note that removing Modules from parts is not always safe - doing it with TweakScale is certain doom on scaled parts.

Edited September 30, 2023 by Lisias
Tyops!