If you have a save where you can reproduce the damage, might be interesting to see what happens without the sinking mod. My theory is the timing of the rise above crush depth was coincidental with enough damage lasting long enough you finally had a cascading failure. In other words, you didn't get shallow soon enough, nor shallow enough. The crush depth itself probably added to the damage.
As far as damage repair, I have had the crew fix minor flodding before it got to full when the initial damage was relatively light, I had a dedicated damage crew already in place with top-notch ratings and initiated Battle Stations. Any kind of flooding though indicates a lot of damage to the pressure hull which restricts further successful operations.
-Pv-
|