Ship Reset After Adding a Ship to Collection

[Slaghead]

Ok, so I just started playing this and so far the game runs great for me. But I am a little frustrated so maybe someone can explain why this occurred and how this is supposed to work like I am 5.

I had a delivery mission that was about 6-7 star jumps away so I was far from my base planet. I had picked up stuff and the game was telling me to use my base computer. Plus, I had just unlocked solar panels so my teleporter at my base would work.

So, I tried using the teleporter in the space station 6-7 jumps from my base and I had a ship that looked like my regular one and I thought that was cool that it teleported my ship with me. So I went building, etc and then decided I would try taking the ship exploring.

But, although the ship was similar and had the same name it was worth 6m instead of my 3.5m ship. Honestly I'm not sure what made up the difference. But also, it presented me with the options to add this ship to my collection, replace my old ship or leave it. Well, since it was clipping into my base structure, leaving it didn't seem like a good option. So I chose to add it to my collection and fixed enough parts for it to get airborne in order to move it.

Then I was curious about getting my old ship, along with its valuable inventory, back to my base, so I used my teleporter to go back to that space station and I was relieved that my ship was indeed still landed there. I got in it and found that it had reset and all my upgrades and inventory on the ship had disappeared and everything was broken like I had originally found it and of course it was unable to even fly at all much less travel the 6-7 jumps home.

So, I know that this is a basic starter ship but I put a lot of my playing time into making it good and now I just have two broken ships that are practically useless. It seems that I'm just kinda screwed out of a lot of playing time and I am resigned to the fact that I can't fix it without reverting. But I can't actually revert because I don't even know how to manual save and my autosaves are useless.

But I don't understand how ship collections are supposed to work or what I did to cause this and thus how to avoid it in the future. I was surprised that while I found a few similar posts, there weren't that many. I guess there is some sort of workaround by clearing the inventory of your old ship before getting in the new one? I am really just a little confused as I was trying to figure out how I would have removed the inventory from my old ship and was I also supposed to remove all of the upgrades?