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I don't remember more than a case or two in modern naval history of ships captured in combat and effectively salvaged.
Besides, towing a badly damaged ship away from the combat area would not be an easy trick, even less so if it was a foreign ship, which your sailors do not know well. IRL even friendly ships were scuttled after battle.
That dredged up a memory. During my first Navy sea tour (decades ago), that ship actually had a formal Scuttle Ship Bill. It was basically just a listing of which particular valves in the machinery rooms needed to be opened, which closed, etc. But even so, a sobering little document.
It's one thing to read about such events in history books or watch youtube videos. It's a bit different when you're looking at the specific instructions because if push comes to shove, YOU are the one who's gonna be doing it, lol.
the enemy sinks the ship at the end of the battle and is recorded as sunk on the battle log.
Which is *exactly* the sort of things that a scuttle party would destroy/render unusable (typically *not* salvage, because of the risk of being captured as POWs) before abandoning ship.
-You would need to handle unkown machinery without a (readable) manual, and mostly the signs etc. will be written in a foreign language or even in an unkown alphabet
-the next enemy may be just behind the horizon
-the ship maybe be badly damaged, even in a (long taking) sinking state without massive repairs/damage control
-You need to get it back to your next base big enough having a dock for this ship, maybe through hostile waters
-Even if at home, the ship is, as fighting unit, mostly worthless, as the firms making spare parts and ammo are in a foreign, enemy country maybe, and wont sell you anything, and a lot of stuff wont match your own standarts, producing stuff for it will be expensive
-A lot of ships were outdated and obsolete even before they were finished, tech progresses fast and ships take long to build
The interesting question is now how happy were the japanese with these old russion ships and were the ships worth the effords. Some of them were even obsolte before they went through a long yourney and a big naval battle. We already had this discussion once.
Taking and repairing ships in a captured harbour is not soo rare. Germany tried in WWII with several dutch and french, and later italian ships. But getting them finhied, adjusted and ready took longer sometimes as building you own ones.
I doubt the capacity to recover and tow capitol ships to port, without power or steerage.
I have found a rather effective method, using cheap DDs, fast and bristling with triple mounts of 2.9" guns, maximized towards HE, with almost no penetration.
The either burn the enemy down or kill his crew. I can build these DDs in about 6mo, and the enemy BB takes 24-36 months!
The enemy is usually too busy dodging torpedoes to have any accuracy. Tough choice, kill that insect who's bite is negligible or get stung by that torpedo?
By the rules of war, a surrendered ship does so verbally (on radio) or by striking its colors. At that point what conditions exist were determined by what era we are talking about.
In the age of sail, a surrendered ship was to heave to and await boarding. Honor didn't prevent important papers or cargo from being destroyed (thrown overboard) but the ship itself was expected to continue to fight to stay afloat and become properly of the winner. The winners were expected to care for the surrendered crew and injured if at all possible.
Those conditions mostly existed up to about WWI, but as others have pointed out, certain conflicts took on their own dimensions as not all nations practiced the European traditions of gallantry and chivalry. China and Japan did not early on but Japan tended toward European models as their fleet commanders were increasingly trained in Western methods. (To this day, China does not practice standard naval considerations as witnessed by their continual actions in the South China Sea against international convention agreements.)
WWII had things change due to the introduction of 'total war', mostly starting the U-boat arena, and nations began to claim abandonment of the old ways because nobody knew if subs were around and would shoot at recovering ships stopped to aid sailors or civilians in the water. Later on in the conflict, nobody expected anyone to help anyone in the water. It became a known that ships in conflict, or in danger of immediate conflict, wouldn't stop to help anybody, even their own forces, until the area was secured.
Yes, the above is a very simplistic rendering of the actual events, but real considerations tended to not be just by era, but by nation and commander(s) present. There are exceptions to those points on both sides of the issues, but those are general points of order.
Now, if the devs were to look at those points and write the game to try to follow that history... well, we'd get a bigger mess than we already have.
So, I'm okay with the ship just being treated as 'sunk' and removed from the particular register of ships. They cease to be a combatant and are 'sunk'. This is a super simple result and works okay... not perfect, but okay.
We have far, far, bigger issues in the game than this one to try to resolve. This is probably issue #275 out of 500.