I have several ship designs I created in a previous game of GalCiv2 that I'd like to use in my current game. Since I didn't want to research the specific techs in each of the designs I went into the previous game and saved a variant of each with absolutely no modules, weapons, engines, or defenses on them. Only the extras, since what I wanted was the shape.

So now theoretically all I'd need to research is the techs for the size hulls to aquire each of these. The problem is, in the new game, none of them are showing up. I have researched all hulls up to massive, in fact, but still none showed up. Previous ship designs whose tech I fully research did show up, but these were designs already created before I started this game.

So my questions are this: are the only ship designs that are available are ones that were present already when you create a new game? Or do they only show up once you're researched the tech required for the initial design of a particular class, even if subsequent designs are completely stripped of all tech? If not, what can I do to make these appear in my shipyard?

(I don't want to research the techs for them - that was a mass driver heavy game, and this one is a beam heavy universe. And really, researching the required weapons/engines/defense/module techs isn't my question.)

Thanks in advance.