[Suicide Junkie]

Starting techs are not a part of the game, if that's what you're asking.

There was a thread on how to mod some starting techs a while back...

But, anyways: if you're doing a scenario, just turn off all the AI in the game, and play the first 20 turns or so.
You can make each empire do whatever research you desire, without them expanding.
You can then also go around and build ships, rename planets, anything.
I like the idea of using a super-race (all racial techs, say) which can gift one Supership (which cannot be fully repaired by any single race) to each player before abandoning all ships & planets (and being removed from the game.