16 Inch Guns, 3,000 People: USS Iowa Opening By the Numbers

The battleship USS Iowa officially opened this past weekend as a floating museum at the Port of LA. The ship was built in 1940, according to the LA Times, and is famous for ferrying President Franklin D. Roosevelt to Casablanca on his way to the Tehran Conference in 1943. Getting the ship set up in LA was a major feat and it's already enormously popular (just another step in San Pedro's unlikely gentrification); let's break it all down by the numbers:

-- More than 3,000: number of people who visited on opening day.
-- 1,500: Number of tickets that presold for Saturday's opening, according to the Daily Breeze.
-- 6 am: time the line started forming on Saturday.
-- 9 am: time the ribbon was cut.
-- One: marriage proposal on Saturday.
-- More than 20: number of family members one former Iowa midshipman brought to the opening.
-- One month: time from the Iowa's arrival in the Port to its opening as a museum.
-- Three years: Usual length of time to set up a battleship as a museum (from start to finish), according to Robert Kent, director of the nonprofit that now runs the Iowa.
-- $9 million: Amount of money raised by the Pacific Battleship Center to move and restore the Iowa; $3 million came from the state of Iowa and the group also took out $5 million in loans.

-- 15 percent: Amount of the ship currently open to the public.
-- One: route through the ship, via "a wardroom where officers ate and relaxed, around the vessel's upper decks and through the captain's quarters that once hosted Roosevelt."
-- Five: Number of tours through the ship that will be available by 2015.
-- 95 percent: Amount of the ship that will be open to the public by 2015.
-- 200,000: Visitors per year the museum needs to break even.
-- More than 1,000: Number of people who applied to be volunteers at the ship.
-- 16 inches: diameter* of the battleship's guns.
-- 2,700 pounds: Weight of the projectiles those guns could hurl 20 miles.
-- More than two acres: Space the decks of the ship would take up if spread out.
-- One: Number of bathtubs the USS Iowa has--it was built for Roosevelt and is the only battleship to have one.