
Players often choose the Poisoned Paranid start since the reward for the opening mission is a Hyperion Vanguard (plus another ship that I can't recall). When the ship is given to you it comes with a random assortment of shields, guns, engine tunings, and equipment.
The cool part is the chance that your Hyperion will have more engine tunings than it would otherwise be able to carry (if you captured one, you could upgrade it 15 times to a max speed of 169.1 m/s). If you're lucky (or persistant) you can get one with a lot more.
So, I did a little experiment. Once I'd accumulated enough money to afford the treatment, I docked at the Boron station and saved my game.
I then spent nearly three hours playing: pay money, get ship, look at speed, load game. Rinse, repeat.
Each time you pay the equipment generated for your ship is completely random, including the number of engine tunings the ship has. Here are the statistics that I ended up with, displayed as Engine Tunings / Speed / number of times this configuration showed up.
12 / 148.8 / 30
13 / 155.5 / 21
14 / 162.3 / 23
15 / 169.1 / 19
16 / 175.8 / 22
17 / 182.6 / 12
18 / 189.4 / 14
19 / 196.1 / 7
20 / 202.9 / 6
21 / 209.7 / 8
22 / 216.4 / 2
23 / 223.2 / 1
24 / 230.0 / 0
25 / 236.7 / 1
26 / 243.5 / 0
27 / 250.2 / 0
Total reloads: 166
When I got the 236.7 I stopped since that's fast enough for me. Someone else did a memory hack to find the maximum tunings you can get are 27 (which is how I made up the fastest two at the end of the list).
Just thought I'd post this so people would know what they're up against, and especially to tell players that you don't have to settle for an under-tuned Hyperion. You can re-load a few times and get a over-tuned one without much trouble. Note that I received one that goes over 200m/s 18 times out of 166 loads, which is more than a 10% probability.
Acceleration is also overtuned in direct relation to top speed, but the rudder is somewhat random. It is possible to get a alightly overtuned rudder, but the top speed was more interesting to me so I ignored the rudder tunings. My 236.7 had a rudder that was less than the normal max so I had to buy one more rudder tuning.
I hope this helps!