Alright, I would like to direct the attention of all of you to a game that will alleviate some of VSTEP's requests to add working battleships and aircraft carriers to Ship Sim, or ships breaking apart as they sink, etc.:
http://worldofwarships.com/World of Warships is a game being developed by the same company that made World of Tanks and World of Warplanes, but by a different group of people, who are more knowledgeable of naval physics and warfare. World of Warships will focus on destroyers, cruisers, aircraft carriers, and battleships from 1906 to approximately 1950 or so when we saw the final battleships being launched. Basically, if the weaponry is guided, it's not going to be included in the game.
The principle idea is that the controls are as easy as WASD to move the ship (QERF to hold the ship's rudder or engines at a particular setting; either hard/full, half, or neutral each way), while the mouse points your weaponry and turrets. However, even though the controls are simple, the hallmark for this publisher is that the behind-the-scenes calculations are incredibly complex, and almost everything for the game is calculated on their servers, which makes cheating a virtual impossibility!
The way that ships sink is one example of how complex the game will be behind the scenes in its calculations: the game will use extensive research to ensure that watertight compartments are placed historically accurately, and ships will sink if they pass a certain threshold, and do so accurately based on where they have been hit through their armor. (Shots will not always penetrate armor, because angle of impact, speed, etc. of salvos, torpedoes, and bombs are all calculated compared to the thickness of enemy armor. They can also penetrate one layer of armor and explode before penetrating the next, etc.) In fact, if you critically damage the hull of the ship or drain a ship's HP to 0, the 3D modelers have designed it where ships can split into as many as 4 parts!(That is, they modeled the ships so each one can break along its halfway point, or the halfway point of those halves). Ships will still have hit points that do NOT regenerate (and players will NOT respawn over the course of a match, so you will need better strategy here than in most games), though ships might sink before they run out of hit points. Because of these, beaching WILL be a viable tactic, though you won't have too many hit points left afterwards if you do, so a few more armor-penetrating rounds will probably finish you off.
I am posting this here because the developers host daily Q&As, so if you want to see how accurate they are to ship dynamics (which they most likely will be to a surprising degree; one of its sister projects, World of Warplanes, takes into account the drag on each bomb a plane has in determining how the plane handles), I can either answer based on previous Q&A responses, or ask
Just keep in mind that certain things won't be in the game, such as anchors or large waves (though they might reevaluate the latter after the game launches), because they are trying to remain accurate to historical tactics.
