Having played a few games now I've been looking at the percentage hits involved by toting up the various damage markers.
I note that some folks have already wondered about the amount of damage inflicted, which presumably is intended for a quick game.
Looking at how the numbers stack up its fairly obvious that the real ship killers here are the +1 to +5s tagged on to things like Crew, Sail, Mast, Leak etc hits, that count towards the overall ship total, as well as giving the special effects of these particular hits.
In fact for any given range/ammo combination they double the percentage chance for damage to the overall ship count.
I'm going to knock this on the head and treat them as just the effect they carry on their own and see how this effects game play.