“I found this spoon, sir.”
Sorry. I was channelling “The Life of Brian” rather than “Firefly”. I won’t happen again. Maybe. 
Real, yes. But that’s different from first hand. Could be that he knows someone who knows someone who found a ship the Reavers had hit, and got his info from them.
I agree with that. I get the impression from Mal that no one has a first hand, face to face encounter with Reavers and lives to tell the story.
I understand that. They were basically ransacking the place, but still. Looking under a placemat, then looking under the placemat again? It just looked silly to me, and something I’d give Joss Whedon some shit about, if he were a personal friend of mine. Like NE Texan said, “what are you looking for, a note with a little diagram pointing to the window outside the galley?”
audit1, that’s a good point. They really should have noticed there appeared to be evidence of two more people living there than they could account for.
I don’t know about that. The commander seemed to assume the refugees were there, and his men were sent to look for them. Whether or not Simon and River’s belongings were there is irrelevant. If they can be found, then it wouldn’t matter if there had been no other signs of them. On the other hand, if they weren’t on the ship, it doesn’t matter if there were signs of two others; could have been killed recently, dropped at the last stop, or left with the hypothetical ship Serenity just might have docked with prior to the Alliance ship coming. The Alliance commander was going to sell the ship and put the crew in custody anyway.
I think the soldiers were looking for stuff to steal (cash?) while they were there. 'cuz the Alliance probably doesn’t pay too shiny.
In addition to “no noise in space” Serenity obeyed physics by matching rotation with the delerect. You can see the stars rotating in comparison.
I also noticed that Serenity shuts down her engines when she breaks orbit and obeys Mr. Newton’s Laws.