This problem started happening after a bug with a ship designer.

I wanted to delete a custom ship that i created in the ship designer, so I clicked "delete" however, nothing happened so i ended up clicking it around 10-20 times before giving up and deciding to restart the game.

When I exited the ship designer to get back into the game, I found a bunch of "are you sure you want to delete this custom ship?" popup windows open. I am guessing the options appeared below the ship designer screen instead of above it. So, I clicked "yes" on all 10-20 of them. After I have done so, my game just crashed.

Now my game is broken and I cannot start a new game! When i click "verify game cache" it always says that the game has 2 missing files and that steam is going to redownload it, but it STILL DOESN'T WORK! I have tried deleting and reinstalling the game too!