... When a warship is sending a party to board you, shooting at them is a very good way of ending up sunk. People have a very wrong idea of the situation where

... When a warship is sending a party to board you, shooting at them is a very good way of ending up sunk. People have a very wrong idea of the situation where this would be used. The warship that sends the boarding party is going to have an overwhelming firepower advantage over anything they intend to board. They could sink the ship and kill everyone on board in less than a minute if they wanted to. The point is, in peacetime that's not a line they are going to cross unless the idiots start shooting first. A lot of the job of navies is basically acting as the sea cops, harassing wayward freighters and fishing ships into obeying whatever laws they are currently breaking. It's quite common for, say, Chinese ships to just try and leave fast enough that it's impossible to board them, trusting that the Naval vessel accosting them is not willing to start a shooting war. This adds another option for boarding such vessels.