Another important thing, my friend, is to make them pop-up in different times, not all at the same time. Put some delay between items (life boats) as the ship sinks (not after). If you're worried about the manual work of doing it to each ship.dat, don't worry, I can do this part of the job for you no problem. The good part is that this is definitive, and MUCH more realistic. As soon as the ship is doomed to sink, the life boats starts to pop-up, one by one, with some good 30 seconds of delay between one and another.
In my opinion it can't be better then that...
