I don't know how helpful this will be, but I always got my yacht right before The Vault mission and never had any trouble. Maybe check at whatever station you have to go to before The Vault?
Thanks for the info. It makes a lot of sense. The consoles were improvements over whatever they replaced, and they were free from the reputation boxes. I'm not in a fleet, so I suppose the Research consoles will be unavailable to me. Maybe I can find something better on the exchange.
I started in Closed Beta due to a special offer that if you bought a LTS for Champions Online you got a key for the closed beta. I bought the LTS for STO pretty early on. I take long breaks but come back from time to time to play. It has been fun reading these posts and recognizing names "from the past".