Help with Cobra Commander and mad scientist

[Failed_Hero]

Hey folks I am to skope attempting a a new Cobra Commander mesh onto the nazi_general mesh.  but when I saved the new character over the old character the keyframes disappeared and the mesh that I built onto the skeleton was there; however, so was the "hidden" nazi_general mesh, this has happen to me on the thug_with_bat mesh does anyone know what the issue is?

I am trying to create a large eye_of_reich mesh large enough to put a male_basic mesh in order to build a mad scientist with a tenticle robot, I can't seem to get the male_basic skoped correctly onto the brain stem, it floats during animations. 

Any help with these works would be appreciated   

[detourne_me]

first im assuming you saved over the character.kf and not the character.nif
a simple mistake but that would've wiped the keyframes.    you can actually title some keyframes character.kf   or others too...   if you look through some past conversations on this site, there are some cool ways to save disk space by linking to keyframes files through a text file.

aanyway, back on topic,  the reason why the "hidden" mesh is still there is because well.... IG meshes can't be hidden so easily,  at least not in my experience with them.  what i've done to get around this is alpha enable the editable mesh, and then make a blank .tga for the character's regular texture file. 
if you want to see it in practice, check out one of the nazi general, or other IG skopes i've done (in my first yahoo group).

you'll see i totally cheated and just alpha'd out the main mesh.

[Failed_Hero]

Awesome this will help fantastically