Judging from all versions of the game I possess - no, and the DL's don't have different techs as is in the techtree. Just that they don't have to research them - they start out with them from turn 1 on.

However, what you can do is useing their shipstyles, you would need to change a small entry in an xml-file of the installations-folder; but they lack some hulls, thus, the game won't propose you with most stock-designs, as well as the differentiation between them is harder, so generally that's no good choice to do so.