old ships come back every load

Hey, thanks for the feedback, I will share it with the team.

In the meantime, you could use a workaround:
Go into %userprofile%\Documents\My Games\GalCiv4\Designs and delete the old designs you no longer want anymore, directly in that folder.

I have a related quibble. It isn't so much that I don't want to keep my designs ( I do for future games) but once I've obsoleted the design in my current game, I don't want to have to do it again every time I load a game. I typically only get to play 1-2 hours a few time per week and it's really annoying to have to obsolete all my old designs every time I start to play. I typically play huge galaxies with ~40-50 opponents so by late game I have a lot of designs obsoleted.

Is it possible to keep the obsolete flag something that saves to avoid this please? 

The work around is do this on the ship designer page. THe button will change to temporarily hide this design. This will hide it for the rest of the game. The obsolete button is only for the play session. 

Sometimes you have to clear 2 copies of the design. Not sure but if you temp hide the design and you see a new one hide that one too.

Thanks, I’ll do that for now.