I am new to galciv3 but a long time veteran of the older games. The answer i can give you is that if there is a way, i never found it.

When it comes to ship designs, the time consuming part is the appearance, not the active components. Honestly, there is no point keeping designs with active components because the game is always changing too much as time goes on.

So whenever i build a new ship, i always save it as a template without any active components. That way, at any time in the game, or any future game i want to build a new ship, i can bring up that design and add whatever combination of components i need at that time in that game.