It certainly does not work right away in beta 6. Haven't reached that far with 5.3, so I don't know.
If you have a constructor in hand, send it to a starbase, you get the exact same number of construction points as before.
If you build a new constructor of the same model you had, you get the exact same number of construction points as before.
Once you get new techs and a new constructor model... than I think it works. Or it's just that maybe (most likely) I wasn't paying enough attention to that, I was busy trying to replicate crashes. In any case, this require more testing.