While doing a fort assault on Tortuga, the Queen Anne's Revenge ended up bouncing around the bay like absolute mad.
She was literally flying at what must have been well over 50 knots or something stupid. Then she sank due to the collision damage.
Hmm. She is an odd shape, so I had a look at her bounding sphere information in TOOL and dug out the Maya file to help visualise what's going on.
Here's what the sphere looks like (in green) against the ship, with the exact positioning and scale:
As you can see, it appears to be in line with the extremities at the very front and rear of the model (i.e. the tip of the figurehead, and the cage arm on the stern).
It's also unusually high, with its centre at 6.859 on the Y axis. For comparison, Victory's bounding sphere has its centre at 4.19.
I imagine this would cause strange things if a really small ship got too close, and might start to get 'squashed' by the sphere as it curves downwards quite drastically before it reaches sea level.
All it would take is the QAR bobbing up and down and colliding with a small ship as it dips, effectively launching the two apart. This might explain what we're seeing in the game?
Of course, we don't even know exactly how this sphere is used in the game. Obviously it would be impossible for
any two ships to get alongside each other if the whole width of the sphere were used for collision, so maybe it gets scaled inwards along the X-axis?