There's a bug that I reported a little while ago that I just realized may be the explanation for why people are seeing AI ships that violate what players of the same tech level can do.
The bug is this: There's no check on pre-designed ships to make sure you have enough miniaturization tech to build them.
As a test, I loaded up a saved game where I had almost all of the techs researched and had both miniaturization improvements built. I then designed a tiny ship with two stingers (stinger II, I think) on it, something that just can't be done without almost all of the miniaturization techs/improvements available. I then saved the design and quit that game, started a new one, made a beeline for the stinger techs, and as soon as I had the matching stinger tech, I could build the ship, even though I had no miniaturization tech, and was cramming something like 24 or 32 spaces worth of components into a 16 space hull.
If the AIs have a list of prebuilt ship designs and some of those designs assume that some level of miniaturization was available, then the AI is probably also capable of building these oversized ships.
