. . . . Other illustrations make clear that the Navy was thinking of berthing several submarines at a time within in-bottom installations. For many years, I wondered how crews could keep from going stir crazy as they silently patrolled the ocean depths for months on end – up to a half year at a time! These illustrations have gotten me to thinking about other possibilities. Who knows what submarines and their crews really do when they submerge and disappear at sea for months on end?

Consider, for example, this “racetrack” facility (Illustration 6-7) – also called the “Nautilus Concept” – that can dock three submarines at a time, with an adjoining sister facility that also can handle multiple submarines. The picture is virtually self-explanatory. Large submarines are hundreds of feet long, so the dimensions of a facility such as shown here would have to be very large. The central docking area might be more than a thousand feet long and easily more than a hundred feet in diameter. The living quarters would obviously have to accommodate hundreds of crew members in some degree of creature comfort. In the bottom-center you will notice the same arrangement as in the previous illustration for circulating cooling water for a nuclear power plant. There are also two tunnels connecting the deep sea with the crew quarters. Perhaps these represent emergency ingress-egress hatches and tunnels for the living quarters.