Thank you for 2.03 .. I noticed the question upon activation of a game ..
reset time to zero ? nice touch

Then I looked at an edit with known deleted ships .. I scrolled out past ID 27 to the Deleted ships 28 thru 199 and then found ships 200 and 201 both pods ..

I deleted the first one , and it said deleted , I deleted the next one .. and the ID reset to 27 .. so kool

That was a very good fix.

Does the planet editor do the same ?
I know I'll have to move the data screens one at a time to box out the deleted ones before deleting the planets .. I just wanted to know .. I am still looking for a game with deleted planets .. I think one is Sub zero .. I'll look and then check back.

Thanks again

I may be wrong , but it looks like you did fix on planet editor as well.
and it was easier then I thought to move the data ..

I moved the planet on the end into the deleted slot .. and deleted the last one.
the index was set accordingly

I checked the next last one .. it wasn't active .. and looked to be identical
to the planet in ID 0 , so I deleted that one as well .. again the index reset to
reflect the current real count.

Darn I'm happy

I thought the problem was ship-specific. Doesn't surprise me that it's planets as well. Could probably happen to aliens as well, because they all use the same subsytems.

I really need to know how it happens so I can fix it properly. It's impossible to add a record beyond an empty record. What seems to be happening is a record gets added at like record 200, and all of the records before it are undefined. I just put in a scan at the start of running a TW app that locates any undefined records (the ship name field always has a color formatting string to start, so an undefined record is missing that string) and marks it as deleted. If all records at the end of the file are deleted, it truncates. Otherwise, it leaves them so you can clean up yourself.

I can do the same with both planets and aliens. But man I'd like to figure out how this is happening.

I don't think I have ever had this happen when I made an edit.
But I have found many that were made by others.

One such GameOp that has produced a handful of edits with these
deleted ships and or planets is Vader ... I sent you one of his TWAs
and now the problem is gone ... I checked and repaired the Sub Zero edit
it had a deleted planet , So I moved my Terra planet into that spot.
(my SO_Terra_Setter script) a pregame opening setup I do.

So I'll keep an eye out for a TWA that has a bunch of deleted ships at the end that bounces me to the menu .. and send it when I find one.

Anyone else that has one like this , send it to J.P. and we can get to the
bottom of this quicker.

Thanks again.