Here are some questions that should have jumped out at me 20 years ago
when I did programming/industrial engineering for a medium sized car
company? [1]

What's the operational lifespan of a starship?

How many Type S Scouts have ever been made?

At the time of the typical Traveller campaign, how many Type S scouts:

     Exist?

     Are operational?

My point is that I'm thinking that there's a fairly large amount of
handwavium keeping player characters away from starships in
Traveller. Or, when one considers that the Type S is both ubiquitous
and really really old. A group of player characters should be able to
acquire a handful of them from which they could build a working
example for a lot less than the 27 MCr that a brand new Type S costs.

[1] The company I worked for made 250,000 cars per month at the
time. These were distributed across 2 brands or about 10
Model-Door-Year variants at the time.

[2] I'm a car guy so I watch a show called Wheeler Dealers. The hosts
are a car salesman and a car mechanic. On one episode they built a
military spec H1 HumVee into a post-apocolypse "Bug Out" vehicle. To
get their donor vehicle they went to a California salvage yard that
literally had hundreds if not thousands of H1s parked on it. I can
imagine a class E star port with hundreds if not thousands of Type S
scouts on the sand in various states of teardown.

--
Chris

      __o          "All I was trying to do was get home from work."
    _`\<,_           -Rosa Parks
___(*)/_(*)____.___o____..___..o...________ooO..._____________________
Christopher Sean Hilton                    [chris/at/vindaloo/dot/com]