Hello John,
Welcome to SARP, I am Nashoba one of the Site Admins, and a Faction Manager, and a Game Master on the site.
To answer your questions.
1. Yes you can play a FreeLancer type, you can do so in the Open Roleplay sections, or you can see about joining one of the Independent plots
2. Depends on who you belong to. For example in the case of a citizen of Yamatai they create mental backups of their citizens. So typically when you die, a new body is generated identical to your original and then they download your memories back into it. Most likely you die, your space dust.
3. Folks do create characters and things as a Homage to their favorites, however, we do have to avoid copyright issues, so character names from such are normally not allowed, and technology has to be in accordance to our site rules. For example, Droids is considered a trademark of Star Wars, so we avoid using that term. We refer to our small robots as drones or robots, and our androids as well, androids.