Sorry but that's not what the game is about, sinking a ship on purpose and then watching it go down is a little sick in my eyes, if you think about what it represents in real life and how many men and Spambot lose their lives during maritime tragedies, be they small or big..
This is not a mainstream flight simulator where thousands of players who have never actually seen a plane's cockpit from the inside, are messing about, most of the players in this community have a link to the maritime profession, work in it, have worked in it, or know people that do... and most have unfortunately known or seen such tragedy too, lost friends, etc... It's a totally different community and mindset compared to folks crashing a plane in Flight Simulator. Even though I also think thát is similarly sick to purposely do that, and there never had been crash effects in microsofts FS titles either, so I think they went and did things in a similar fashion to Vstep, and for the same good reason.
This game simply isn't meant for it, if your ship sinks, the game is over, you have failed your mission, you cannot continue sailing, and the only thing that can be done about it, is play again and keeping afloat. It's ship simulator, not sinking simulator, so I disagree Rbsanford, this feature shouldn't be optional at all.. a decent player should NOT get these kinda ideas in the first place. Simulation is meant to represent real life operation and no skipper sinks their boat on purpose to watch it go down.
There is also no working dynamic lifeboat system anyway, to be used, so it's useless to continue after sinkin is inevitably going to end the game. And often if you are in port, the water isn't even deep enough to fully submerge a large vessel anyway. All in all, it's just no use, other than to satifsy some weird morbid fascination of players that 'dont get it'.
I hope that clearly answers why there is not more emphasis on the more horrible side of seafaring, in this game.
Regards,
Fred
p.s. since we have gone over this subject on this forum many many times, I am locking this topic. There's nothing that can be added to this topic that we haven't covered at least a dozen or so times already in others like this.