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IMTU, I can't square a bank getting behind an indie belter with a multimillion credit loan. I can just square the idea of an indie belter lucking into a rattletrap J, though I'd as soon give a new player something on the lines of a Launch that's been kitted out for belt work, or shared time on a company-owned gig.
Here's a post on cheap ships I made in another forum.
I handled this a bit differently - make the ships cheap to buy and cheap-ish to run, but keep the total amount of money available to the PCs low.
I've assumed a market for secondhand starships such as free traders, the price of which is largely driven by the condition of the ship and the revenue generating potential in a frontier region where such a ship might be operated profitably. Thus, you could buy a used trading ship for a few million credits and there is a grey market for used, refurbished and off-brand parts where the maintenance history and actual hours on the part might not be quite as presented.
This keeps the total monies in the campaign relatively low but allows the party to buy and operate a starship. This has the effect of reducing the gap between the costs of outfitting for adventuring and the finances involved in running the starship so the presence of starship-level finances doesn't unduly affect game balance for adventuring purposes.
As an analogy, there are (or were until recently) routes on which it it was still economical to run Boeing 707s, which are obsolete by most modern standards. At one point the market value for an airworthy 707 was about 2 million USD. Similarly, there was quite a substantial market in third party parts and maintenance services for DC3's , which were widely used in third world countries right into the 1980s and later. These services went as far as upgrade kits to fit turboprop engines to the airframe.
If you take this analogy, you can have a market for folks buying and running used trading ships where the purchase price is a small fraction - perhaps 5-20% of the new value - of the craft. The price is driven not by the cost of constructing the ship but by the revenue generating potential - i.e. at what point does the ROI make purchasing the ship worth it.
Say, for argument's sake, that the revenue generating potential of a type A2 trader is Cr60,000 for cargo and Cr40,000 for passengers, giving a revenue of Cr100,000 per jump or Cr2.4 million per annum. Each jump uses Cr22,000 worth of refined fuel and the maintenance cost is Cr500,000 per annum and Cr1000 landing fees per jump for 24 jumps per annum. Crew salaries are (say) Cr250,000 per annum.
Assuming you've got 2.4 million of revenue and 1.3m of costs per annum your ship can bring in a gross profit of (say) Cr1.1m P/A. If you assume this is a somewhat risky venture and insist on a 20% ROI then this means you can justify investing Cr5.5 million in total, which defines the market value of the ship as Cr5.5 million less the cost of any work that needs doing. A bank might insist on a 20% down payment of 1.1 million, which is a figure that could be achieved by a party of adventurers without making them so wealthy as to cause issues with game balance.
This keeps the finances a bit more tame, so you can go with a party of adventurers running their ship on a shoestring without having to write in a third party stumping up 50-100 million for the purchase of the ship.
