Design your own, the stock designs are simply not worth building. More importantly, the issue you are running into was caused by the individual tech trees in TA. So many civs are missing basic techs, or have other race-specific techs taking the place of basic techs, that standard preprogrammed ships simply aren't feasible.

In fact, there is an autodesign feature that will do this for you in TA, although many people turn it off immediately as it gets really annoying to get upgrades every time you research something. Someone else will need to talk you through that, as I haven't touched that since the week it was introduced in beta.

Yeah i know you can and I have but they never seem to be as powerful as the ones the enemy has. It seems once they have dreadnoughts Im done. I have designed ships soley to destroy the dreanought it had a ton of beam defense and it used mass drivers the most powerful i had and i was like 2 techs short of the highest one whatever it was. and i still had my clock cleaned.