One of the less celebrated campaigns of the Revolutionary War was the several attempts to plant underwater explosives on British ships using a watertight spherical craft called The Turtle. The efforts were unsuccessful, and the Turtle eventually sunk — but its legacy lives on at the Submarine Force Museum, which details the evolution of submarine warfare from 1775 to the modern day. The museum inhabits the grounds of the Naval Submarine Base in Groton, a 10-minute drive down the coast from Mystic. The highlight is a trip below decks on the USS Nautilus, the world’s first nuclear submarine, which sailed more than 500,000 miles during the height of the Cold War between 1954 and 1980.