The Metaverse and Non-Meta ships are located in differant folders. If you look in your game folders (under My Documents) you'll see that they both have seperate ship folders. You may be able to copy from your old one and paste them into the Metaverse folder, but since the Metaverse checks to make sure you aren't cheating I don't know if this will throw up a cheat flag.

If you don't hear anything from a Stardock employee, what you could try it anyway, then just do a 1v1 cakewalk (something you can win in 15 or 20 minutes) and see if it flags you.

I couldn't wait - I tried what you said, and it worked! Didn't realize that Metaverse kept a separate ships folder. I completed the game on cakewalk, but because of a serial number problem, it wouldn't upload to Metaverse. That's another problem for another post, though. It didn't say anything about me cheating, although I can't say if that would happen before or after the uplink to Metaverse. But so far, so good! Since it was a cakewalk game where I crushed the hapless Thalans in about 10 minutes, I'm not all broken up about not getting to upload.