Ok, understood now - thanks. :)

I'll try to avoid this problem in the future ( offsetting was necessary anyway, since it can be hard to hit the right connection-point when there are many... ) , but for that one ship I'll likely have to try fidgeting around to fix it...

Once you save as group you will still be in the designer with the ship grouped as one part. Just ungroup the parts and it will save as a ship as long as you dont exit from the designer. They have tried to fix the export bug and have fixed it to some degree but it ddoes appear when you dont want it too. I just learnt not to add to export parts for safety reasons that will cause mental distress and the overr used phrase of WTF?! Again there are ways around it. So you should be able to do what you want for a ship (not another export). Placing parts on safe parts then offsetting them to the export will work. Also making a new export part to fill any roll you may need is another option, then attaching that to a safe part and offsetting it to where you want it also works. Its the joys of designing, many ways to skin a cat

Oh - so in short: it's because I attached them to the exported part, which sometimes works and sometimes not. (would be nice if the devs fixed that...)
Best practice: Avoid connecting other parts to exported ones.

That's sadly not really an option for this ship :/ , but still thanks for the explanation. :)


And about your previous answer: it partly sounded as if it was possible to ungroup a saved part? I guess I mixed something up there when reading, because in my experience this doesn't work - or is my experience insufficient there?

Yes, its the export bug. This happens when you attach parts to an exported part. Sometimes you can get away with it but not often and it reverts your parts back to the normal 100% mark which destorts the entire part. Can also get stuck in parts its attached to so you cant delete it (you can if your lucky but its very tricky). I avoid attaching any parts to an exported part for this reason. If I ever equip the ships I would avoid putting equipent on them aswell just to be safe. To get around this, place parts and even other export parts on a normal basic every day run of the mill part and then off set it to the exported part (goes with equipment too), just to be safe.

Eh, not totally (but thanks for answering)...
To describe my issue more detailed:

I first saved a stock-ship as part because I wanted to scale its' proportions and then used the resulting part for a template.

Later, I loaded that template and added some normal parts to it, saved again as template.

That worked for another iteration - afterwards I added some more parts, which seemed to save ok again, but when I tried to save the result as ship later on, several of the normal parts were totally mis-scaled (and propably mis-rotated too) .

You have to save it separately. What I do is select all parts and then save as part. The ship should become all one part (after naming it) and then with your ship, select Ungroup parts then save as ship. You could save the ship first then group the parts but I like to know if it all fits and groups nicely first. You can also test the ship by grouping parts, just remember to ungroup them and save as part next, then ungroup and save as ship. Hope this is clear..lol

Thanks for the info on how exporting works - I had found out the "no other export parts" point myself; but the other one explains some things, thanks. :)


Though I still have another problem - a ship which uses an export part and saves fine as a template, but gets basically scrapped when I try to save it as actual ship ( not as part )...
Any idea what could be causing this behaviour?

TY TY TY!

Sure mate

Do I have permission to repost it with credits in disription?

It is. Any design that doesnt use mirroring or other export parts should be exportable if its all connected to the first part. To find that out, simply select the first part and offset it. If the entire design moves with it, it should be exportable. I was going to add that it is exportable in the description but it seems to scare some away thinking that you have too or its too advanced or complicated.

Can you make an export version that I can put on my ships?

Very Nice!