Tubular

Despite my wife's calculated advice ("duck"), I only hit my head twice.
After last week's celebration of all things supersonically stealthy, this week we were able to hop-skip over to the piers for an arranged tour of the USS Hampton, a Los Angeles-class nuclear-powered submarine. (I walked around with my hands in front of the jibblies, if you know what I mean.) Some random stats:

Displacement: 6000 tons light, 6927 tons full, 927 tons dead
Length: 110.3 meters (362 feet)
Beam: 10 meters (33 feet)
Draft: 9.4 meters (31 feet)
Complement: 12 officers, 98 men
Armament: four 21-inch torpedo tubes, 12 vertical launch Tomahawk missiles

They split us up into groups of four or five and took us down into various parts of the boat (subs are "boats"; surface craft are "ships"). After crossing a gangplank from the dock and having a bell rung -- very traditional-like, each of us stopped and saluted the flag at the bow (front; the pilots amongst us referred to it as the "nose") of the sub, which I didn't really understand, but I didn't want to *har!* rock the boat, so I complied. We eased around the main mast, regarding the odd, black, playground-rubber-like coating around the entire hull, and then stepped down into the sub, where we were greeted by the "captain", even though he was only a Commander. Again, some Navy tradition.
It only got really cramped down in the third level back in the machinery room, where you had to walk almost sideways to squeeze between racks, but headroom really wasn't a problem (the head-butts I attained were from climbing up some angled stairs and hitting something near the periscope -- I checked out my car to make sure it was still on the pier). But it still boggles the mind to think that 110 men are crammed into the equivalent of a three-story apartment building for anywhere from ten days to two months (there are only about thirty bunks on the boat, so with shift work you can see there's an awful lot of sharing).
The Lieutenant showed us the bridge and told us about the sonar equipment, so I did my best quiet Sean Connery ("One ping only, pleash.") for the amusement of DQ, who repeated it out loud and got a big laugh. Bastard.
So next week one of the Army dudes needs to get us a tour of a tank or something.