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The REAL Sinking Fix

As the title suggests, this is the real fix for ships not sinking in this game. A little disclaimer: ships still take a while to sink - the larger and the more crew, the longer it will take. That is just how the game works. If you want to sink a ship faster, you need to keep concentrating cannon fire on it.

Not compatible with anything that changes combat stats (excluding missile range or other missile properties) of these ships.
Fully Savegame compatible.

If you are not interested in the technicalities of this mod, you can stop reading here. I will spend the rest of this description talking about the real cause for ships not sinking, which is a bit complicated.

First of all, i want to say that the "older" sinking fixes might not actually fix the problem, however the changes they made were based of a completely valid observation - that FOTS Ships have a "Flood Threshold to Sink" of 0.5, whereas S2 ships have one of 0.1. For a long time, I also believed that this was the reason for ships not sinking until I did a lot of testing recently. Through my efforts, I was able to find out that the problem ships in S2 have is twofold:

1. Ships display a wrecked hull far too soon
   
2. Ships start sinking only if the complete hull is basically down to 0 health

The first one can be easily fixed by changing the "xyz panels above water critical" to a much lower value - I picked 0.25 (a.k.a 25%), down from 0.8 (80%) which most vanilla ships had. Yes, their hulls would look like they were completely wrecked as soon as their health dropped below 80%. Needless to say a ship with 80% of its health left is not going to start sinking anytime soon.
The second one is caused by the "Water bail out modifier" of the ships being far too high. I am fairly certain that this value adds a "counterweight" to the water coming into the ship, delaying the process of sinking. After reducing this value from 1.5 and higher to 0.1 on all ships without exceptions, the ships would start to display "sinking" shortly after the hull was starting too look wrecked and slowly begin to go under. The more damaged the hull, the faster.

So there you go, a very complicated issue finally solved after so many years. I do not blame the creators of the old sinking fixes for not figuring this out, as it is quite complicated although I probably made it sound simple.