When I was a little kid, my favourite books were those full of illustrations that showed cutouts of aeroplanes, ships, locomotives, space vehicles and all kinds of machinery. They still are. Machines’ guts are fascinating. Devoid of any skin, you can’t do anything but marvel at human ingenuity.
Here you have some amazing and often surprising examples, including the photo above. What the hell is that Terminator about to kill someone, anyway?
You’ve seen it more than a hundred times from the outside. This is how it looks inside: the space shuttle’s liquid hydrogen tank.
Image: NASA/NASA [clear]
A barebones Saturn IB S-IB stage without its tanks and eight H-1 engines, which produced a combined thrust of 726,000kg.
Photo: NASA/Michoud Assembly Facility [clear]
The crazy guts of the Planck Observatory, a spaceship built by the European Space Agency to “observe the anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background”. And eat humans.
Image: European Space Agency (ESA)/Stephane Corvaja [clear]
A real life cutout: the engine room of the MV Tricolor, a Norwegian ship that sunk in the English Channel carrying carrying 3000 automobiles.
Image: tricolorsalvage.com (defunct) via The Atlantic and Marine Nationale/Getty Images [clear]
The guts of a Computer Tomography scanner. This thing can spin twice per second.
Image: The Herald/Dan Bates [clear]
Part of the cowling of a B-25 bomber engine being assembled in 1942.
Image: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division/Alfred T. Palmer [clear]
A modern aeroplane engine: the Engine Alliance GP7000 turbofan engine, capable of pushing 37,000kg of force (363kN) at full thrust.
Image: AP/Jessica Hill, Jens Meyer [clear]
The open rotor and combustion chamber of a much powerful engine, the SGT5-4000F gas turbine.
Image: Siemens AG [clear]
The interior of another familiar shuttle friend: NASA’s 747 mothership.
Image: NASA [clear]
A naked and obsolete (super) computer: Cray Y-MP at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Image: LLNL [clear]
More engines: the CPR 8000 steam locomotive’s water tube boiler and firebox is a crazily complex plumbing job.
Image: Brass Goggles [clear]
Compare it to this old-school electric locomotive, the Kalman Kando’s V40.
Scanned from Möller Károly: A mai technika (Technics Today). Királyi Magyar Egyetemi Nyomda (Hungarian Royal University Press), Budapest, 1942, photographer unknown. [clear]
Image curation by Attila Nagy