I've just updated to 1.4x after playing through several games (and designing quite a number of custom ships) with the boxed 1.0 version.
I understand that after the upgrade any new ship designs will have associated .xml files but I notice that the old ships remain as .shipclass files. I've tried to upgrade my old ship designs by loading a 1.0 saved game and making new versions of them, hoping to generate an .xml file. Unfortunately the shipyard now displays my old designs as a large number of random components stacked on top of the original hull with no real reference to my original creation

Is there any way to bring my old designs into the new .xml version or does upgrading beyond 1.0 mean starting from scratch?