Late response, but time to give this whole section some new life!
Yeah, I think it's fairly obvious that viper's aren't that easy to assemble. And Starbuck I think is the kind of warrior who would pride himself on keeping an old, familiar machine in working order for a number of yahrens. But after Young Lords, he had to have a new viper since there would have been no way of recovering his crashed one.
In Take The Celestra, we learn that the Celestra does act as a maintenance ship for vipers, and maybe it's safe to assume this is where new vipers are built. How long a process it takes is something that certainly could have been better established in the series.
