Quote:
Originally Posted by cptbutton
Pirates take a ship, kill the entire crew, and put a prize crew aboard. The passengers retake the ship and get it back to an honest starport. The captain was sole owner, and information about any heirs is a sector away.
What kind of salvage fee are the passengers due?
What will an Admirality court do? Put the ship in an impound lot until heir information gets here? Sell the ship, pay the salvage fee and escrow the remaining money?
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Canon says independent Repossessors (aka Skip Tracers) get 2-5% from the admiralty. (JTAS-16 p26, "Giving the Bank a Fighting Chance"). I'd expect the passengers to be treated almost the same, save for reduced culpability for the deaths of the pirates.
The Admiralty is probably going to auction it off or directly accession it.
If there's a bank note, the bank gets it, or its value, after coughing up the recovery percentage.
As Chris notes, the pirates probably have bounties.
In non-GT flavors, insurance is not mentioned; if it exists, it's solely a part of the note, and not payable to the owner; it might, however, prevent owing if it's destroyed or stolen without owner/crew barratry¹ nor ineptitude.
The Admiralty isn't likely to hang on to ships long. They take a cut of the proceeds, too, as "court costs". So they have incentive to rapidly return ships to service.
If the PC's want to get their hands on it, I'd say they need to be part of the auction. How to handle that is a whole 'nother can of worms. And that auction's likely to be about 1-3 months down the road. How long is likely to be "as short as the law allows"...
Now, if the owner was intestate, and had no listed heirs on his identity docs (and there should be notation of that in the data slug) nor mentioned in ships papers, The admiralty would likely just seize it as intestate property, and then auction it off.
¹ Stealing a ship you have legal access_to/possession_of at the time of departure. If there's a note, even the owner can wind up committing barratry.