[HEMISENT]

My vote has to go with Redwine's thoughts and the historical behavior and sensible survival probabilities. This is a submarine simulator and simulators are supposed to mimic the feel of what it was like as close as possible. Just because an AI merchant deck gun fires 30 rounds per minute does not mean we increase the gun reload times on the players boat. What we do is slow the rate of fire down on the merchant then attempt to set the shell damage to levels that approximate realism. There's no way to exactly reproduce realism but we can do our best to come up with realistic behavior.