I have found that the type and experience of the ship and crew you are engaging matters greatly. While small destroyers, trawlers, etc generally couldn't hit a barn if it as sitting on their bow, the more experienced crews later in the war on frigates and capital ships were able to do some nice shooting in fair weather. I had in fact seen both ends of the spectrum in a single engagement with a Fiji class landing some very nice hits while some Tribals right next to it seemed to have been blinded by the sun. On other missions, the Tribals had deadly accuracy within 4km and the lighter destroyers sucked.
I believe there is some randomness involved in selecting the experience level of the crews for the ships -- with larger, more valuable ships having a greater weight towards experience. I could always be wrong though, it's been a while since I looked at those files. Weather plays a very large role in targeting ability I've noticed.
The lack of sinking was probably because the armor was so thick on the BBs that it took very large guns to punch through. Since SH3 uses one armor level for the whole ship, everything gets that invulnerability.
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