DANCING ROOM!! You gotta be kidding! If you just stood up straight real quick in one of the old diesel boats I served on, you'd knock yourself cold! I was 5'10" when I was younger and I still walk around with a stoop!
Talk about engines! The USS Trout SS-566, had not one, not two, but THREE diesel engines all in the same engine room! That's in a boat with a 27-foot beam and that's the exterior measurement, including ballast tanks! (She was probably less than 18'-20' inside the hull!) Originally she had GM pancake engines, the same as several other boats in her class, which were a miserable failure and were eventually replaced with FM 10's. The GM engines failed so often that the submarine service made up a poem about that class boat. It went: "Harder, Darter, Trigger, Trout, always in and never out." Most of the problems were caused by oil leaks. Those GM engines were rotary, sort of like old airplane engines, but stood vertically on their ends, with the generator mounted below the engine. The damn things leaked oil so badly the generators were constantly shorting out. Not good in a diesel/electric propulsion system.
When you talk about "Dancing Room", you're thinking about nukes.. I never served on a nuke. They actually make fresh air and all the water you can drink on those things! They didn't call diesel boats "Sewer Pipes" because they smelled nice! We never made enough water to use it frivolously, like for taking showers and stuff.. We were a 'nasty' bunch at best.. "Deep Diving, Death Defying, Steely-Eyed Killers", to the core.. but nasty dirty..
Roger
