Persistant file, custom Kerbal applicant names, and their "specialty"

[Somtaaw]

Is there any specific thing I'm missing for renaming Kerbal applicants to custom names, without losing their specialty?

In the old days, pre-specialty, you'd just open the persistant file, re-name Kerbals however you want, and then load the save. Now everytime I try and rename Engineers/Scientists, they all suddenly become Pilots.

I'm a bit of a Homeworld nut, so I want to name a Scientist "Clee-San", and some Engineers "Mothership" or "Pride of Hiigara" or maybe even the "Kuun Lan".... but everytime I rename a Kerbal of the right specialty, they suddenly become pilots the next time I load the career. Rather frustrating, and I'm sure there must be a step I'm missing now.

Edited April 30, 2015 by Somtaaw

[sumghai]

As of 0.90, a Kerbal's specialization is based on the hash of each Kerbal's name, and so renaming the Kerbal changes its specialization in a non-intuitive manner. According to some folks on KSP's IRC chat channel, SQUAD's intention was to ensure persistence between save games e.g. Billy-Bob Kerman might always be a Scientist with high stupidity.

Personally, I agree that one should be able to manually customize their Kerbals to have the desired profession for headcanon / role-play purposes. The Ship Manifest add-on does use a workaround of padding non-alphanumeric ASCII characters to Kerbal names to force the desired specialization, but this is an extremely hacky workaround and results in strange characters being displayed in Map View.

futrtrubl made the following suggestion, which I quite like:

What Squad should do is, upon creation of a Kerbal, base its profession on its name hash and save that as a separate variable. This will allow same named Kerbals across saves to have the same profession unless changed by an addon, and allow graceful name and profession changes.

[Somtaaw]

damn. random specialties is a bit of a downer.

[sumghai]

damn. random specialties is a bit of a downer.

I wouldn't call the speciality assignments random, since they are algorithmically and deterministically based on the hash of the Kerbal name (i.e. a Kerbal with a certain name will *always* be a certain profession).

But I certainly don't like the unintuitive and uncustomizable nature of the current system, either.