I'm not sure if this has been reported before but I've gotten some ships I used in previous games come available before I should be able to use them.  The techs that unlock them have been researched but the capacity to put all of the components I had placed in the previous game was not.  For example, in a previous game I had a tile with caverns next to a military resource and it had more spaces and I was playing a custom race with the Yor tech tree, so I had a +8 adjacency bonus on the hyperion shrinker and made a sensor ship with a 160 capacity.  This game I didn't get as good a tile and only got a +6 for the shrinker but as soon as I researched the sensor tech I could build the ship from the previous game with another 30 capacity beyond what I had unlocked.