One of the major contributors to survivability of a surface combatant is her vulnerability to weapon effects and as such the damage stability characteristics have a direct influence on vulnerability. There are serious concerns about the limitations of the current semi-empirical deterministic criteria in which a combatant’s damage stability is assessed upon. This paper details a comparison between the current approach and a newly presented probabilistic approach with the aim of determining which will result in a more accurate way of estimating the level of survivability of a particular design. A study is also presented in which the damage length used is increased to merchant standards of 0.24Lbp.