colour striking

What makes colour striking unlikely nowadays?
1) combat damage rendering communications impossible with other ships
2) weapons which do so much damage that you never get a chance to think
about striking your colours before you pretty much die
3) chaos and damage rendering situational control aboard the vessel
which
might strike its colours impossible
4) damage to internal ships communications

Modern ships tend not to surrender. But how many times will modern
commanders avoid a fight? How often will they withdraw at the first sign
of
a threat to the prized battlewagons? How often will they either just
abandon
ship or scuttle and abandon when confronted with combat versus a nasty
foe? 

Morale in a modern naval sense boils down to a few factors:

Do you have a motivation to fight? If it is a "battle of the line", then
yes
you do. If it is a recce patrol and you are suddenly surrounded and
can't
FTL, you probably don't. It might also depend on how your enemy treats
prisoners. As much as a Captain has a duty to his Admiralty to sell his
vessel for a high cost, he also has an obligation to his crew to protect
their wellbeing. This might, under some circumstances, mean surrendering
without taking much damage (for fear of taking a lot of damage if the
vessel
persisted in combat). And most Captains aren't suicidal. 

Is it strategically sensible to fight? If you are on a recce mission,
you
might want to break contact and escape. If you are damaged in an
engagement,
it might be more important to save your crew, escape for repair, and
come
back to fight later than to go down shooting. 

You really have several levels of morale questions:
1) When do your ships attempt to withdraw from a conflict? 
2) When do your ships consider surrender?
3) When do your ships consider scuttling or self-destruction?

It is far more likely that strategic or crew-safety concerns will
provoke an
early withdrawal than it is that anyone will surrender a ship. If the
ship
cannot withdraw, then surrender would probably be an option IF there was
enough command and control left on that ship to consider it and IF the
enemy
was likely to treat surrendering forces well. Either battle damage or a
ruthless enemy might make a ship that wanted to withdraw keep fighting.
Similarly, scuttling might happen to prevent a battle from occuring
(scuttle
in port), to prevent the capture of a ship (that can't get away), etc.
But
scuttling shouldn't be automatic either because battle damage may render
it
infeasible (similar to rendering surrendering infeasible due to loss of
systems or command and control). 

So you really have two levels of morale to consider....
fight/withdraw and surrender/scuttle/fight

If your vessel decides it is no longer in shape to fight (by some
criteria
such as thresholds perhaps? Or by being so outgunned it would just die
if it
fired?), then it should attempt to withdraw. If this is infeasible, a
wholly
new secondary consideration must be made - given one can't withdraw, do
you
fight and hope to win anyway, do you attempt to scuttle, or do you just
surrender? 

Scenario rules that take into account the context are probably the only
way
to do this justice, though some rough guidelines ought to be possible to
draft. 

------------------------------------------
Thomas R. S. Barclay
Voice: (613) 722-3232 ext 349
e-mail: tomb@bitheads.com

2001: To the New Millenium! The next thousand years
are MINE. 
------------------------------------------