Change parts on ship in orbit using the quicksave-file

[Kerbrud]

Hi all!

I'm kind of recreating NASA's Constellation mission, where I will send three ships to Duna; one command-ship (which will serve as a spacecenter) and two support-ships. I guess I screwed up the design on the two support-ships, because I installed way too small antennas (I'm using Remote Tech). It's vital to the mission that the two support-ships are connected to the command-ship at all times.

Now, all three ships are in orbit. I'm nearing the launch-window, so I don't think I have the time to launch two re-designed support-ships with the larger antennas. Looking through the quicksave-file, I've been able to copy in larger antennaes, which seemingly look all fine and dandy. The problem is that although the position of the new antenna matches the position of the original one, it's not really attached to the same parent part. This results in an antenna floating in mid-air. In my case, I just copied the new antenna from another random ship, where the parent was number 11. On the ship in question, the parent should've been 76. Therefore, I tried copying the lines from and including UID to and including srfN from my backup quicksave-file. This should've left me with the positioning data of the old antenna, and everything else for the new antenna. This results in most of the ship being gone.

If I post the VESSEL-data here, do any of you think you can help me?

[Starstrider42]

I had to do something similar when I first installed RemoteTech 2; I had a bunch of deep-space probes that I had to upgrade from the stock Communotron 16. Fortunately, it's not too hard if you're careful.

Your first method should have left you with an antenna that "looks" like it's not attached, but is. In that case, simply tweak the position and rotation values until you get something that looks correct.

If you're starting over from scratch, you may find it easier to keep the old antenna almost intact and only replace a few key values: name, mass, rTrf, ModuleAnimateGeneric, and ModuleRTAntenna. You definitely don't want to edit parent, srfN, or attN by hand; I don't think there's a way to do that that doesn't corrupt the ship's structure.

[Kerbrud]

I managed to fix it. I think I was editing the wrong part, which made everything wrong. Now my two support-ships should work just fine! I can't wait to see if I'm able to pull this mission off. The timing will be the most difficult part, as I have to get all three ships into LDO at roughly the same time.

[PrivateFlip]

Just curious, how close do they need to be together and why?

[Noticeably FAT]

For the future, I've had decent luck with building a ship as I want it in orbit, sending it to the launchpad, then in the persistence file swapping in the orbital parameters from the bad ship into the good ship on the pad. It sounds like it worked out for you, but I haven't had good luck trying to swap/remove individual parts.