deploying ships for a mission

I recently ran into a problem trying to deploy newly designed ships on a mission. the new ships did not appear in the list of ships available for deployment on a mission. the correct race had been selected and the new designs accounted for anamolies. if you select ‘new ship’ for that mission, the new designs are also not available for loading. I also noticed that entire blocks of ship designs are not now available for deployment. they had been available previously. all of the new and old ship designs do show up when you enter ‘ship design’ outside of a mission, however. I should probably mention that I had hundreds of ship designs in the program ship file. I reduced the number of designs, but still have the same problem. reloading gsb2 would be a minor disaster for me now. is there an update deployments switch or other work around for this situation?