Attribute inheritance problem when using Instantiate

Ive got a prefab (a space ship) occasionally Instantiating another of the same kind of prefab (another space ship) from within the instantiator's script. When I do this the new ship that's spawned does not inherit all of the attributes that I assigned in the editor for prefabs of this type, but the attributes of the ship that spawned it. Is there a simple way to tell it to not adopt all of the attributes of its instantiator or must I reasign the variables one-by-one after I've instantiated it.

Also, the variable that's being pointed to Instantiate to tell it what prefab to instantiate was set in the editor and is a reference to the prefab. I'm not (at least knowingly) pointing Instantiate to the transform of the object that's doing the instantiating.

Thanks for any help you can provide,

Dave

First of all, it's not an attribute. At least in C# an attribute is a special class that can be attached to another class. See Attribute. You talk about member variables of your class.

Anyway, this behaviour is a bit hard to understand. I don't will go into detail now. Fact is if you have a prefab with a script that holds a reference to itself, this reference will be replaced with your object instance at creation time. Just avoid self-pointing references. Use eg. a singleton manager for the reference.

More details on this issue in the Unity Forum

Here a singleton manager example in JS (i don't use JS but i've writting this already for somebody else ;) )

// The simplest singleton without checking
// scriptfile is named: "PrefabManager"

static var manager : PrefabManager = null;

var spaceShipPrefab : GameObject;

function Awake() {
    manager = this;
}

Place this script on an empty GameObject and assign your prefabs to your public variables.

In any other script (even in a script on your spaceship) you can do:

Instantiate(PrefabManager.manager.spaceShipPrefab);

to create a new instance.