Why no HEAT or SABOT rounds for Battleships or Navy?

[FromMyColdDeadHand]

I remember discussing the USS Stark attack in NROTC with our instructor, an active duty naval officer who was once assigned to the USS Missouri. He said that if those missiles had hit the battleship they would have just swept off the deck and continued mission. The armored belt is that thick.

The guy Who runs the battleship New Jersey museum did a comparison of an Iowa versus a Kirov class. Definitely the carafe has the advantage in longer range and heavier missiles, even contemplating the tomahawks the Iowa carried in the 80s, but once you get within 20 miles it’s over. If.

Metallurgy is fascinating. Some thing that I knew nothing about as a kid or even into college as a potential career. I would’ve thought they had everything figured out by now, and then the production and quality is always a issue. It would’ve been an interesting career.

[chuckman]

I remember discussing the USS Stark attack in NROTC with our instructor, an active duty naval officer who was once assigned to the USS Missouri. He said that if those missiles had hit the battleship they would have just swept off the deck and continued mission. The armored belt is that thick.

One of my RDCs in boot was a sailor on the Stark. He was generally an a-hole, but when we did damage control, he was Mr. Professional and really did a good job. After boot camp graduation, before the busses came to take us to O'Hare, he told us about the incident and how it all went down.

[TehLlama]

Was the tech just to late for the work to be done on battle ships? The defensive armour systems on modern Battleships to thick to make it worth it? It seems that they would have been interesting to address the 'zone of invulnerability' issues, and for easier targeting with faster traveling rounds. Is because of the need for smooth bore guns?

When you're going up against bulk steel, the answer is just raw momentum and correctly timing fusing, and even the 14" guns dating back to the Colorado/New Mexico BB's had enough to make the holes needed. Saboting rounds, unless it's some peculiar phenolic that would have made barrel life improve, would only have had value in making projectiles higher velocity to flatten trajectory, and realistically for the design effort, improving fire control radar (similarly spin that towards better air search and coordinated AA central fire control) does more for you.
Given the magazine size of these, and how they actually wound up spending 99% of their time, whatever enables close in shore bombardment is the ideal answer, and neither of those really do great there.

As far as HEAT, you can just run standard contact-fuzed HE, and in that size range, you get all of those same effects you'd want out of that - remember, the scale of these things, a 16" shell (even the low mass higher velocity ones) are showing up with enough explosive energy that they still had overpenetration issues in shore bombardment, or when hitting enemy destroyers.

As far as why BB's died off - they operate within a 30 mile threat radius (unless supplemented with guided missiles), and are hydrodynamically compromised in order to be able to withstand the punishment of other large caliber shells and stay mission operational. The best of that was how South Dakota shrugged off a bomb hit during the Battle of the Philippine Sea (more or less), and went right back to AA duties. The worst was seeing just how little Yamato could do to change its fate during Ten-Go, and that unsupported battleships basically had no business in the battlespace anymore (even the battle off Samar showed that a bunch of second-line beater CVE's could still actually put up a meaningful fight against the Yamato, Nagato, and two Kongos)