Why boarding a modern warship is room-to-room combat

Could a modern force capture a cruiser-sized warship through a boarding action?

Only with great difficulty, because the attackers would need to seize engineering, fire control, and the bridge across a heavily subdivided ship.

Modern ship architecture made boarding fundamentally different from the age of sail. Capturing a sailing ship's deck could give an attacker control of propulsion and movement, but a steel warship contains many lockable, watertight compartments. A Tribal-class flotilla considered boarding Deutschland, although an interception was more likely to end with torpedoes, and the Altmark incident remained an exceptional successful boarding. Fighting through a modern warship would resemble close urban combat inside a complex machine. Attackers would need to secure main engineering, fire control, and the bridge nearly simultaneously before the ship could be controlled. The design features that limit flooding also make hostile capture extraordinarily difficult.