ochd said:
More newbie questions arise, as I prep for the forthcoming session ...
I don't think they're newbie questions at all. To be honest, I think in a lot of cases, authors of adventures are sloppy and don't understand the implications of a Red Zone and sort of unconsciously assume the Imperium will come punish you,
A Red Zone is determined by the Imperial government. Furthermore, it's used by the TAS to indicate to their members worlds that are extremely hazardous outside of Imperial space. I'm sure non-Imperial entities can also declare some system or another as a Red Zone, but it's up to them to enforce it (or not).
The Scout Service is known to make a world a Red Zone to protect some developing civilization from outside tampering. The Navy is known to create Red Zones for those thrilling Area 51 conspiracy theory reasons - they do it to cover up their mistakes or to hide facilities. Third major reason is to warn people away for safety reasons.
Outside of the Imperium, both protecting nascent civilizations and covering your own mistakes are completely dependent on the ability of some local government to enforce that Red Zone, detect intruders and punish them. So in areas that don't have space navies or whatever that can enforce them, you're not going to see RZs of this variety.
Instead, Red Zones would be created to call attention to spaceship operators to stay away from a planet for their own safety. For instance, the world might be going through a civil war, it might be ruled by a regime likely to seize the assets of offworlders or imprison/execute them (the regime might be despotic or perhaps they just don't like visitors so declared their own world a Red Zone), or perhaps the local biosphere is hazardous in some way to visitors. In all of these cases, nobody really enforces the Red Zone, it's just the TAS calling attention to "you should stay away from this place unless you really know what you're doing, and don't say we didn't warn you."
ochd said:
If a starship is found floating in outer space somewhere in the Sindal subsector, with all people on board dead, then who arbitrates on salvage rights, takes responsibility for investigating it, etc.?
If there's no powers that enforce a claim on the star system (remember, in Traveller, pretty much all action occurs in the inner/mid solar system, the only time someone would be in the space between stars with nothing around would be because of a misjump or because they're at a calibration point), then the wreck is pretty much free game.
This seems unthinkable on our modern Earth where everything is answered for and claimed, satellites fly overhead, and so on. But remember, for much of Earth's history, this is exactly the way it was. If you were some 1700s ship operator and you found a wreck on some remote, uninhabited island, you could go and loot the wreck and do whatever you wanted with it. Because everyone understood this reality, let's say you found some British schooner or something, if you gave them Christian burials somehow figured out who was on board and sent a letter (or letters) to the owners of the ship saying you found their wreck, it's pretty likely they'd thank you for telling them what happened to their missing ship if they wanted something aboard the ship, they'd follow the ancient law of salvage - eg; it's yours, not theirs, and if they want it, they need to give you something of equivalent value in return.
Similarly it ties into the legends about why pirates wore so much bling (supposedly) - they did it in the hopes that if they died at sea and their body was found somehow, the finders would give them a proper Christian burial in exchange for all the bling the guy was wearing (using some of the bling to pay for the burial, the rest was for the finder to keep).
