A way to abort a buggy load?

[artwhaley]

If you load a saved game that used a part that no longer exists in your gamedata directory... the game throws up an error about any ships that used that part not being loaded... and they're just gone. Even if you immediately exit and reload the game - any ships that weren't loaded are gone forever.

This can be really frustrating if you forgot that you'd used a strut or some other piece from that otherwise unused mod you wanted to delete.... or for those of us that make parts it's really annoying when we make a mistake in our config file editing and NONE of the parts in the game get loaded... so all of our test vessels explode.

It would be great if, after loading a saved game where errors are generated, you got an option to abort and NOT save the new version with your exploded ships.

[CaptRobau]

That would be a great idea. An overall overhaul of the missing part vessel pop-up would be welcome too. A button to close the pop-up and buttons the navigate info screens that detail what vessel is/will be destroyed and what parts are the cause of that (with a scroll bar so you can list hundreds of parts).

[pellinor]

It also would be good to have a way of repairing craft files with missing parts. I see that some things might not be well defined, like things that were attached to a missing part. In these cases I would often be happy to have such parts put somewhere in the editor, as long as the set of parts and their tweaks are preserved.

[vexx32]

I think simply replacing 'unknown' parts with a placeholder part would work fine, really. It could simply have a predetermined size (for things that are surface-mounted) or scale as needed (say, between two node attachments that the mod part is attached to). It needn't look pretty -- heck, make it as awful looking as possible to encourage players to remove it. That'd solve all the problems in one go. If it's possible to colour-code it by the part id that it has, you could even distinguish between different mod parts without that mod even being installed.

[Javster]

Already, in the VAB/SPH, if your plane has experimental parts, it loads it, but it tells you why you can't launch

[vexx32]

Those are experimental parts. They still have models and textures associated with them. If you remove the part entirely, KSP doesn't currently have any way to render them, much less load them cleanly.

[magico13]

The secret technique you are looking for is likely "Alt-F4". That's the standard shortcut (on Windows and Linux, on mac it is probably a similar key set) to close a program. By closing KSP with Alt-F4 (or going windowed and closing with the exit button) it won't save to the persistence file and any ships removed from missing parts will magically reappear (since they weren't removed from the file itself yet). So if you unexpectedly find that your 100 hours of Mun-base are missing because of a single radially attached part from a mod you don't use anymore, you can Alt-F4 out, reinstall the mod, then fix the problem with some creative use of KAS or Whack a Kerbal

Edit: If you change scenes (like going into the VAB or tracking station) or if you exit to the main menu, it's too late and you can't do this anymore, but you may be able to load a quicksave (you may have to do it manually by renaming the quicksave file, but I'm not sure on that)