Hi. I need an old and ramshackle ship that a few hundred people could live on. The weirder and rarer the better. Something that would be owned by those without much choice and endlessly patched. It's going to be the floating artistic community of lightly mad people in my game.
Published ship is good but if you know a ship that firs but hasn't been, some suggested stats would be really helpful.
Thanks for any suggestions.
This from KoTOR came to mind when I read your post: http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Thranta-class_corvette
I would give it stats a little less than a CR90 and have all the weapons and the primary hyperdrive stripped from it over the centuries.
I'd go in a different direction and create something akin to Space Hulks from the WH40k universe. A number of ships (the scale of the thing is up to you) cobbled together to pretend to be one starship. Imagine several starships crashing into each other and then the wreck travelling as one vehicle. I guess that would be wierd - different eras the individual fuselages come from, engines from a modern capital ship but hyperdrive from a different era, weapons - some blaster turrents but some solid slug projectile launchers etc etc,
If you want an older ship that has been re-purposed, there is something like this.
Or a ship a little larger, but from the Galactic Empire era.
Imperial Leviathan factory Ship.
I don't think the imperials would want these in the hands of anyone but themselves. They aren't exactly old/archaic, heheh.
Thanks for all the suggestions, I really appreciate the time people have taken. I think the Seperatist Supply ship isnthe most oddball and thus the most suitable, but sadly it's way too big from what I can work out. The wiki link doesn't have a crew/passenger number but from what I can deduce, the snip is enormous. I need something that would suit a few hundred.
Something smaller then. Maybe one of these transports would work better.
Enter the Unknown has a really good option in the Xanter-Class Deep-Space Exploration frigate. It's got a crew of 150, consumables to last for long periods of isolation, and is set up to be more roomy than the standard starship. The hydroponic garden/observation deck mentioned in the text seems to fit what you're going for. It's got quite a weapons load, but that can be taken out, or they could have been allowed to lapse due to lack of maintenance.
When you say "a few hundred people can live in," does that make all of them crew or simply "passengers" (and only some of them are crew)?
If they are all crew, you'll want a smaller capital ship (Silhouette 6 at least, 7 at most). If it's a smaller crew, you'll want to be on the smaller side, like Silhouette 6.
For easily-accessible civilian ships, you are looking at the larger-end of Bulk Freighters (the Xiytiar-class, CSS-1 Star Shuttle, and I think Far Horizons had a few) or the smaller-end "capital ships" (like the CR90).
Sadly, there aren't many ships statted to do what you are looking for easily. That said, I'd like to mention the following options:
1) Since this is a group of mad-sentients with artistic bends living on a ship, perhaps the ship isn't a mainline anything. It may have started as one ship but became another.
2) Along the lines of 1, perhaps the ship was something they cobbled together and things keep getting added along the way. It'd be like an "Ugly," but bigger!
In either of these cases, you can either just stat something up and claim it is what it is, or you can take a ship that already exists and tweak it (the Vigil-class Corvette from AoR can be a decent fit with the weapons gutted and a hull/armor reduction based on how it was made. Same is true for the Star Galleon or even the other bulk freighters; just swap 10-20 Encumbranec for people).
3) Do some research, find a ship that fits what you need, and stat it!
You can take just about any capital ship from the Old Republic games and use them. Statting them isn't nearly as hard as you think; it's just a matter of finding something similar and tweaking it to match the new one.
If you need help with ship statting, I'm sure there's a number of us willing to do so (myself included).
Good luck with making the choice that's fitting for what you need!
(p.s. I'm away from the usual resources I have on hand, or else I'd go digging through one of my Guides to Vehicles and Vessels to find some odd choices).
Temple Class Heavy Freighter might work (50 crew, 150 passengers). Can carry 3 large cargo or passenger (or prison) modules also. There are some floor plans available online. We "borrowed" one recently that had a prison pod with 400 prisoners and 50 guards, so that can be your red light/slum section 
(Perlemian Haul adventure.)
We sort of had a little trouble running a blockade over a very out-of-the-way untraveled planet with it such that it ended up with the ion drives disabled. Oops. Anyway, I expect we'll try to use it sort of like the original post as an orbiting outpost for awhile. Once we find and steal a ship and can get back to orbit, that is. 