Bonzai - I edited my first post in this thread with some info. I'll add more later, like ship suggestions.

Also, I've noticed a minor correlation between Survey and second items, but also a minor correlation between sector number and second items, which makes sense. However, it also makes the data hard to gather because as your Survey gets higher, you tend to hit later sectors, flattening out the effects of either change. Also, the Survey requirement of 90 for the later sectors forces the range of values into a smaller band. Also, the all-or-nothing nature of this further obfuscates the data.

I guess we're going to have to, at some point, run a bunch of trips with a ship that has 50 survey and a ship that has 150 survey in some pre-17 sector.