[aylad]

It's shooting bombs because it's a g2k2 ship and g2k2 ships shoot bombs. Geez.

Ok, really I think it's for the exploding cannonball effect. Cannons could shoot bombs with fuses which explode after a certain amount of time. Maybe pirate ships didn't use them so much (or maybe they did, who knows) but the cannonbomb idea really was widely used, at least on land.