Please excuse me if this is a naïve question, if it has been addressed elsewhere or if I have misunderstood the rules. As I understand it when damage tokens are drawn from the appropriate bag they are then used to mark damage to a particular ship rather than being returned to the bag and some other type of token being used to mark the damage. What is the rationale behind this use of the tokens? The reason I ask is that the removal of tokens from the bag could substantially alter the probabilities for the next draw. For example suppose in one encounter the ship being fired upon drew a number of high damage tokens, these are then effectively removed from the game and consequently damage suffered by ships (possibly totally different ones to those in the original encounter) would be proportionally less severe. Personally I cannot think of any reason why this variation on probability of damage should occur or what real world effect it simulates, but I would be interested in other peoples opinions on this.

This would also make simulating damage using dice, as I have seen suggested elsewhere on the site, work in a different way to the token system because the dice rolls would always have a fixed probability every time that they are rolled, rather than the varying probabilities as discussed above.

Finally, to ask a related but slightly different question, once a ship is lost (surrendered, sunk or off the map) are the damage tokens returned to the appropriate bag or do they remain out of play for the remainder of the game?