Haven’t used them for years but don’r recall having this issue before.
If I fit expanded cargoholds onto a ship I am unable to access the additional space unless I make it the active ship. So, if I am in another ship docked up I am unable to transfer more than the normal capacity into the industrial sitting in the ship hanger. If however I make it the active ship I can tranfer the cargo into it with no issues. If I then move back into the original ship and interrogate the cargohold of the industrial the cargo is all there but only apparently occupying the basic cargo capacity.
Yes. That is a correct summary.
And I sympathise. But I doubt it will be changed.
For a lot of the haulers the cargo size is related to the skills the pilot has - for example the Bestower, a basic Amarrian hauler, has a 5% per skill level (Amarr Industrial) bonus. This is in addition to the fitting she ship has.
I suspect CCP’s developers use a generic container size “this is a Bestower” when the ship is inactive to ease the back-end load when it handling loading - by not having to do a bunch of database accessed and so forth.
When you make a ship active I suspect that’s the only point when the they create a specific instance of a ship with all the characteristics relating to its fittings and the pilots skills.
Eve Online - a single instance covering an entire cluster with all players able to interact at all times - is an impressive achievement, but in matters like this it starts to reveal CCP’s magic.
Terak has the gist of it. Whenever a ship is not the active ship, it’s stats will go back to defaults, this includes fitting, HP counts, and cargo capacity.