Firing excess crew members?

[Hurry- Starfish!]

This bugged me without end, but I figured something out. It seems like the game refers to Kerbals that are inside parts, like command pods, by an index number. In the save file that takes the form of lines which begin with "crew = ", followed by a number. This number refers to a Kerbal depending on where they appear in the "ROSTER" part of the save file. That means if you mess with the order of the Kerbals in the file, including deleting one of them, the numbers won't match anymore and the save file somehow breaks (no, I still don't know what exactly happens there).

What you can do without a problem is edit Kerbals and switch them out for other ones. You can also delete Kerbals from the list, as long as there is no Kerbal lower than them on the list that is currently involved in any mission. Presumably you could delete any non-assigned Kerbal you want if you changed all the "crew = " lines accordingly; someone would probably have to write a program for that though, as doing that by hand takes ages.

[cantab]

I don't know how it will affect the rosters, but you could stick them all in one ship, then go into the persistence file and change the ship type to Debris. Assuming you don't have unlimited persistent debris, they'll be "cleaned up" sooner or later.