Maybe I've been chasing the wrong trail. To answer some previous questions, I regularly use a commercial defrag program, and all I have installed is SH4 and OM both brought up to date with JSGME. Once again I encountered a ship whose sinking just would not be recorded properly by the game. Looking more closely, I noticed obvious graphics issues concerning the hull under and around the bridge area.
sh4.jpg
sh4-2.jpg
Are the ship files somehow corrupted? Is there a way to reload only this info?