Scenario Editor

Please can you explain briefly how to edit ships status in the battle editor? 
It's not particularly easy to do, as there's no way to enter exactly what you want in the editor. But you can usually approximate what you want, it just takes time and effort.
The way it works is that you can actually play the game in the editor. When you start editing, the scenario is paused, but you can unpause it give orders to ships just as you can in a regular game. This enables you to have ships shoot at each other, take damage, etc.
So what you do is, you set the speeds of all the ships to zero so they don't move. Then you add some dummy ships to fire on those you want damaged, or to be targets for those you want to have expend ammo. Once they've served their purposes, you pause again and delete the dummy ships. Then you reset the battle start time back to what it was when you started.
The results are thus imprecise. You no control over hit location, so you can't control the damage done. If you really want a particular turret knocked out, you might have to attempt this many times from a save just before you start the dummy shooting. Then save when you've got what you want and do your thing to the next ship.
I nag Norm once in a while to implement something that allows players to just directly enter damage and ammo expenditure as desired on ships. Maybe it would help if you all nagged him, too . Back before there was an editor and I was writing scenarios in a text editor, I had a way to put specific damage and ammo expenditure on ships. That's how I made all the Jutland scenarios. So naturally when the editor came out, I wanted to do the same with it, as it would have made my life easier.