I can't load saves after renaming Kerbals

[Bloojay]

so I made some slight edits to my persistent save file, renamed some kerbals for comedic effect, and disabled stock crafts because they clogged my saved crafts in game, then i go to boot up the game, then load my Save and it opens the prompt but shows nothing, so i close the prompt and try again but click load game didn't do anything. Anyone know how to fix it?

[Bloojay]

Should also point out that i only edited a single save file, but it wasn't loading my other save files

[FullMetalMachinist]

Sounds like you did something bad to the one save file, I hope you have a backup. 

If just one of the saves is corrupt the game won't show any of them. So get rid of the bad save, and the others should show up. 

[Superfluous J]

Kerbals are referred to by name several places in the file. You must change ALL references to that Kerbal to the new name. Some cause weirdness, some cause what you describe, but in all cases it's bad.

But I don't see how changing the persistent.sfs could make it so you couldn't load an otherwise perfectly okay quicksave.sfs from earlier. There must be something else going on there but I don't know what it could be.

[Claw]

In addition to making sure you change all named references, also ensure you don't have an extra blank lines in the save (that can sometimes cause problems). Another thing that sometimes happen during name changes is a bracket { or } might have been inadvertently deleted.

You can open the debug log (ALT+F2) and that might give you some indication as to what's incorrect in the save. If it's a bad kerbal reference, you can really confirm that by trying to enter the astronaut complex. If you have a broken kerbal reference, it will often throw an error when entering the astronaut complex.