Mod removal save game effects?

[mylar536]

TLDR: removing SNACKS! to replace it with TAC. Will it nuke my save?

Started a new career game, wanted to go light on the mods, only the must haves... I was adding them in as I went when I missed something. Two weeks later and I’m back up to around 150 mods. I might be an addict.

I used to run USI life support, but I’ve done TAC before. For this play through I decided to be nice to myself and just run Snacks! That backfired. When loading with snacks for the first time Something three an error due to a lack of resource definition for FreshAir. I don’t mind having air as a resource, so rather than fix the reference, I went ahead and enabled the optional Snacks config file for tracking FreshAir and StaleAir. Lots of mods support snacks, almost none support FreshAir.

I keep finding life support parts I want to use, and I keep having to write quick MM patches to make them work with FreshAir. Writing the patches takes a couple minutes, no biggie, but reloading the game to apply them takes like half an hour. I get back in, keep building with my fixed part... and find another one I want to use, Save... Write patch... 20 minute load... repeat. Experience broken, I may as well just use TAC, it is well supported by other mods, and if I’m using snacks with FreshAir, I might as well use TAC’s oxygen and have it be useful for other mods and converter recipes.

I could easily send up a ferry and empty my space station, and rescue the stranded kerbal in near munar orbit within a few game days, have all kerbals back at KSC and sage for the conversion of life support.

My station has Two giant snacks containers in the middle of it’s structure.
It will just poof out of existence if I remove the Mod that defines those parts, right?

I don’t think my probes and relay stations will be affected.

Is there anything else I need to worry about when removing a mod? I don’t really want to start a new save, I’m okay with writing off my station, it was several hundred thousand credits, but that’s better than having to write in support for a little used sub-mod as I go on to more stations and colonies.

[funkynutz]

Not sure about TAC/SNACKS in particular, but usually it just won't load any ship that have parts from that mod.

[mylar536]

Well, I have to pull my kerbals back to the KSC before I can convert anyway, so gonna go ahead and do that. I’m considering having an engineer see if they can use KAS/KIS to pull those mod parts out of the station. But considering how central they were, not sure how I will stitch the station back together without them.
Back in the day I would have just attached Roverdude’s weldable docking ports to the open parts on either side of the module I’m removing, restocked them and welded them.

It seems like all of Roverdude’s mods stopped getting updated back in 1.8. Did he leave the scene or something?

[misiek]

Your vessels might not load if missing parts. Meaning you will loose them.
But sometimes you can remove mod functionality (delete dll/so), but leave parts in with config files/textures.
When I do something like this I backup saves, remove mods, and then I check if I can live with my loses. Sometimes editing save, and manually removing part from vessel saves the day.

[mylar536]

I’ve never removed a part by editing my save before. I can’t imagine the editing part would be too hard, I can figure that out. Quick question though... what happens with the ship after the edit?

So let’s imagine a simple three part craft in orbit. Nosecone fueltank enigine. All connecting in a line on primary stack nodes. I go into the save and delete the fuel tank, what do I find when I load the save?

A nose cone and engine, still locked in place around an invisible middle?

An engine stuck to the stack mode attach point on the back of a nosecone?

A nose cone and an engine floating disconnected in space near each other but separate entities?

[misiek]

I removed only atachements usually never structural parts. Just try and see :) Backup first.
Also, you can probably cut/paste ship from save to ship file and edit in VAB.