I discovered this after fooling with the ship designer under patch 1.11. Apparently the range of a ship gets reduced when you restart the game.

A survey ship I designed had a range of 3.9 sectors (3 basic life support). Yet after I restarted the game and loaded a save, that ship's range had become 1.7 sectors. Further, ships built under the 3.9 version keep their range, yet the same ship built after restarting the game only has a range of 1.7 sectors. Clicking "Upgrade" and saving the ship design under the same name seems to mostly fix this for subsequent restarts though.

This issue also affects the core ships with their range for those designs with multiple life support packs, unfortunately, they can't be fixed.

Is this a known issue?

EDIT - This still exists in 1.2