Just a heads up for the uninformed, twinge's balance mod is excellent when applied to vanilla FTL. I played maybe my first 10 or so games without it and never looked back. also check back because he updates it every so often. If you are still new to the games/have not unlocked most of the ships be careful of skimming the changelog between updates as there will likely be some spoilers ship names/etc.

http://www.ftlgame.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=14766