Yes life boats and life rafts give you 1 ton and they are counted as merchants.
And if you don't understand what Dogfish means with rocketship, download Rockin' Robbins' Subnuclear torpedos mod and shoot a destroyer once. It'll end up to knockin' on heavens' door

Literally.. Sorry about going off topic but I've wondered many times what would happen if the ship or a plane or something would fell on a warship...
But can anyone confirm is it even possible to take Prisoners of war from those jap life boats or is it just a mod feature?
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Elektroniikka-Asentaja = Electronics Assembler. In finnish, Just in case someone wants to know..
New rig for noisy running:
Desktop w/ Asus P5QC motherboard, Intel Core 2 Duo 2,94 GHz processor, ATI Radeon HD 4800 series graphics, 4 GB DDR3 Ram and 1297 GB hard drive memory
There is a good possibility that the above post was written with a phone so please forgive the typos