The tech room information is actually stored in the pilot files and rewritten based on campaign progress. The best way to get the tech room to do what you want here (if you are making a campaign) is to make the first mission in your campaign have an event that fires immediately (using the true condition) and which uses the tech-add-ships operator to add in whatever ships you want to show at the beginning. This way, when the campaign is started, all of the ships you wanted will show up in the tech room for that player. Note that if you are including all or most of the ships in the game, you will have to split them into multiple tech-add-ships operators within the event, since if you put them all into the same one, some operator limit gets exceeded and the mission does not load properly in the game or fred2.
By the way, does anyone know whether that in-tech-database table flag actually does anything? Some of the ships/weapons in the original V tables have that, but I couldn't get it to do anything at all with my own stuff.
