In the spirit of one of the first mega-adventures back in the day (a big book called The Traveller Adventure), the episodes of SotA can be spaced apart and interrupted by other things, including red herrings. This can reduce the perception of railroading quite a bit.
Many of the published adventures for Traveller, in any edition, have followed the early established pattern of setting up the basics but letting the individual referees produce the gory details. This was especially true of the old Amber Zones, but held for most everything else as well. Unless the layout of a building was important to the story, you would get no map. Guards would be 777 Handgun-1 types in Cloth, etc.
I've found that with a couple published adventures to start you off and a pile of raw material such as 760 Patrons, your PC's ship, and accumulated NPCs from their early stop-offs, your PCs will, unless this is a post-work Friday night game, be generating their own trouble before too long. I started my group off with escaping from a backwater under (inept) invasion, and it sort of follows from there. I know the politics of the cluster they're in, though, so these aren't just UWPs to visit...