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Comment by komali2 | Hacker News Reader

Surely there isn't that much room on a sub. I've heard horror stories of how cramped they are.

That is because the supply rooms are crammed full of XBox 360 controllers.

Food, actually. They cram food all over them. When the embark, they don't have room for all the food in the galley. So, it gets tucked into every nook and cranny.

They don't just get to stop at neighborhood grocery stores, after all.

This is true (Former submariner here). We store food in the torpedo room, engine room, fan rooms, etc...pretty much anywhere that won't impede dealing with casualty response.

Yeah, I grew up in a family of Navy and Marines. I'd do my service in the Marines. I also watch way too many documentaries. Submarines are firmly on my nope-list.

For anyone interested in this stuff who hasn't already done it, I'd highly recommend a tour of a museum submarine. I recently did the USS Growler in NYC and it was really neat. Highly obsolete, of course, but the general idea of being cramped and using every bit of space is timeless.

It was hard to imagine living in there for months at a time. One person in my tour group almost started freaking out just in the ten minutes we were inside.

On using every bit of space: I also recommend a visit to Johnson Space Center in Houston. If you are lucky you can catch a tour of the life-sized model of the ISS they have. It's interesting to see the different countries' engineering approach to "using every bit of space." The American modules are fairly well put together, generally non-surprising space saving solutions. The Russians appeared to just give up and hew everything out of solid blocks of some sort of light metal. Then you step into the Japanese module and it's just... perfection...

Wow, I was just making a joke and you responded with something really insightful that I have never thought about at all. I've toured one of the museum submarines a few years ago and it amazed me how cramped everything was. It didn't even occur to me how difficult food storage would have to be.

Thanks!

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