The problem we have seen is that some people have empty ship designs, no hull, no components, nothing. When the game is building your list of ships it tries to process this and crashes. Exactly as you folks have stated, deleting your ship designs resolves the problem.
We have a "fix" in the 1.02 opt-in where we validate the ship file before we load it. That will keep the crash from happening.
But we still don't know what causes the corrupt ship designs to be made. One player who passed me a broken ship said he created it in a multiplayer game, but we haven't been able to reproduce that as a cause. I'm going to try to create one in the campaign and see if that can be a part of it.
But for now the answer is:
1. On 1.01 or earlier if you delete your custom ships from your My Games directory it should fix this. This solution stinks.
2. On 1.02 (currently available as opt-in) you should be able to play without having to delete anything.
If anyone is still having the issue with 1.02 I would love to get your My Games files so I can see if there is another use case we should be checking for.
