When engaging a Tinker fleet composed of 3-4 Dreadnoughts and 4 scouts, I was quite surprised to find that the seemingly weak scouts packed Pulse Generators!
Have to say this was a nice surprise as it did effect the tactics of the battle quite a bit
The question of course is why the tech came from: my money is on one of their fleets raiding a system with a Steward in it, as I was looking for Focus lenses upgrades (a cheap early tech that can be bought from the Herald) on AI ships afterwards but could not find any on the map