Bombardment does not use the battle engine, which writes the battle reports. Bombardments are 1-round actions with not much action. The reports in the mail-box are all that you will get.
Unfortunately, a bug has found its way into bombardment. Lost ships/boats are not being reported; only the number of hits
We used to get a report of every ship/boat sunk by bombardment. Well actually, if you go back far enough, you would only have named ships/boats reported. That is, if they took their names from the models files, and didn't get some genetically generated name, which happens when the list of element names runs out.
For this reason, way-back-when I spent
many hours compiling a list of riverboat names from every possible source on the internet, which were incorporated into the game.
Unfortunately now, patch level 1.06, the report of which ships/boats are sunk by bombardment is not being generated
