You are absolutely right, even though they open some HEX info when opened with Kotor Script Editor (and when opening it says "Decompiling...", when opening them in Notepad I get the source script in clear text!
Must have been something with my version of Kotor Tool, I have no idea...
You have my gratitude for letting me know of this, I couldn't wrap my head around what was going wrong!
I recompiled them, as instructed by the Tutorial: "In order to compile that script and produce the NCS file the game can use, you must extract the include files k_inc_generic.nss, k_inc_gensupport.nss, k_inc_walkways.nss and k_inc_drop.nss. You can find these files with KotorTool in Kotor II --> BIFs --> scripts.bif --> Script, Source. Extract them and save them in the same folder where you have the nwnnsscomp.exe script compiler. (If you are using the script editor in the latest version of KotorTool you shouldn't need to extract the include files manually; it will find them automatically when needed.)"
I extracted the necessary .nss files in my Kotor Script Editor folder, then compiled my 2 scripts. The attached files resulted:
st_ai_puppethb.ncs
puppet.ncs
They now open as encrypted info in Notepad, so I guess it worked this time...