this will be hard to explain clearly, so i'll go through step by step. make a robot, assign various robot parts with specific origins. Learn about bones, give it bones, move it around by dragging the armature in the viewport.
I''ve had some odd problems with animating problem1 probably the same problem
so i tried checking the origins of some of the parts. as soon as i did things like 'origin to geometry' or even 'editmode-selectall-snapcursortoselected' these parts would fly over near the centre of the viewport.
so i 'applied all transforms' and look at this mess what w see here is, the bones have broken free from their meshes, the origins are kinda random but mostly over toward the right of the pic, the feet (silver ball things) have run off, the legs are a broken mess, the gun has fallen off.
spooky action at a distance stuff. i have entangled worlds
what the hell is happening how did it get so bad is there a reasonable way to fix this rather than rebuild piece by piece?