The part about not being warned when you try to use the same name stumps me.

Otherwise, I would think maybe you didn't research the larger hulls in your current game, if you saved the ships in a prior game.

OR You were using a different race than the previous game and the ships arn't available with your current race.

Ah. Good responses! Thanks! Let me rebut:

- I am playing the same race in the same game. I definitely have all the necessary hull techs.

- I did indeed reload to a save of the game prior to when i had designed them. I do not recall exactly when the ships disappeared, but it was definitely around then. Tell me more about this, please!

- And please elaborate on the "S_ (or even the usual UD's) factor". Looking in my ships folder, all the .shpcfg files for these ships start with S4. It sounds like there's a known issue or something with how these files are named .. please enlighten me!

Well, every time you'll START new games with the same race (S4=Torian) the ships (as saved in the usual folders) will be made available TO that race only & upon researching corresponding techs as usual... but the "saved game" files only re_loads active elements that were there at the moment of the saving process.

They're not really "gone" but you won't be able to get at them during the same session. Once you begin a game, it only looks within the save for ships--the ships folder only gets read in at the start of a new one.

Yup.