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...
