I think this has been touched on before but the last reference I could find was a couple of years back and never went anywhere, and this has been driving me nuts so please forgive me for re-approaching something on the topic.
Anyway - at the moment, ship variants seem to exist only within the particular character's save game(s). I find that I often have loadouts that I use very frequently ("Fleet Standard" freighter - ext. shields, 2 vulcans + 2 ACs, some number of capacitors) or find something I really really love with a particular ship and like to use often.
So - if it weren't too high-impact, it would be awfully nice to be able to export variants to a sort of "general library" available to all characters, which could show up with either the pre-defined ones for each ship class or in a secondary area of some sort.
