This came up twice yesterday. Thane attacked an enemy ship with 1 hull remaining and used his pilot ability:

While you perform an attack, you may spend 1 focus , hit , or crit result to look at the defender's facedown damage cards, choose 1, and expose it.

to flip a direct hit. Do you still continue resolving the attack at this point i.e. roll defense dice, potentially deal more damage cards?

Yes. Dead ships are not removed until the end of the Initiative step, nothing says you should stop resolving the attack any more than you would if you dealt 4 hits to a 3-hull ship.

I was a little surprised to see the attack sequence in the new Rules Reference doesn't explicitly have a bullet point where destroyed ships are removed. But there is the line at the bottom of page 5 saying: "If a ship is destroyed during the Engagement Phase, the ship is not removed until all ships of the attacker’s initiative have engaged." (This is also covered in the "Engagement Phase" section on p10.)

"All ships of the attacker's initiative" definitionally includes the attacker itself, so Thane's target isn't removed until after Thane's done engaging, and since "perform an attack" is a thing you can do while engaging, you can't be done with your engagement until after you're done with your attack. So you'd play out all the rest of Thane's attack, including dealing any damage cards.

tl;dr: @thespaceinvader is correct, and here are some citations to support that.

Just now, digitalbusker said:

I was a little surprised to see the attack sequence in the new Rules Reference doesn't explicitly have a bullet point where destroyed ships are removed. But there is the line at the bottom of page 5 saying: "If a ship is destroyed during the Engagement Phase, the ship is not removed until all ships of the attacker’s initiative have engaged." (This is also covered in the "Engagement Phase" section on p10.)

"All ships of the attacker's initiative" definitionally includes the attacker itself, so Thane's target isn't removed until after Thane's done engaging, and since "perform an attack" is a thing you can do while engaging, you can't be done with your engagement until after you're done with your attack. So you'd play out all the rest of Thane's attack, including dealing any damage cards.

tl;dr: @thespaceinvader is correct, and here are some citations to support that.

Gotcha, I was pretty sure on that one, but needed to confirm. Thanks!