Spawning a custom vehicle with the debug menu

I made a flamethrowing tank, and I wanted an army of them, just for fun.

The problem? I would need to spawn them to amass an army. And to spawn them, I need to use the debug menu. To spawn a vehicle with the debug menu, I need to define the vehicle. To define the vehicle I need to make/edit a json file with vehicle definitions.

The problem? To define a vehicle via json I needed to manually define every part, every part location, every stored item, etc.

I don’t really know where this would go, so I might as well post it here and hope I don’t get banned. Anyways, are there any known tricks to defining a vehicle? Some kind of debug option, save editing voodoo, etc?

When defining a vehicle, I use an existing one as a template and edit its json file as needed.

Why on earth would you get banned for posting this?

Some forums are run tighter than the Third Reich. I’m new here, so I’m not sure if legions of angry people will insult me over the internet.

Nah, this sort of tinkering and experimentation is very much supported and encouraged here.

Aye, it’s fine. At worst this might get moved to the toolbox subforum since this is a “code help” thing, but still. Looking at a pre-exisiting vehicle is your best bet. Hell, I think my tanks started off from editing the APCs. That was how the Merkavah-style “entry hatch in the back” idea started, which wound up being the easiest layout for representing a tank in 2D.