When I was a little kid, my favorite books were those full of illustrations that showed the guts of airplanes, ships, locomotives, space vehicles and all kinds of machinery. They still are. Machines' entrails 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.
A barebones Saturn IB S-IB stage without its tanks and eight H-1 engines, which produced a combined thrust of 1,600,000 pounds.
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 by European Space Agency (ESA)/Stephane Corvaja
A real life cutaway: the engine room of the MV Tricolor, a Norwegian ship that sunk in the English Channel carrying carrying 3,000 automobiles.
Image by tricolorsalvage.com (defunct) via The Atlantic and Marine Nationale/Getty Images
The guts of a Computer Tomography scanner. This thing can spin twice per second.
Image by The Herald/Dan Bates
Part of the cowling of a B-25 bomber engine being assembled in 1942.
Image by Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division/Alfred T. Palmer
A modern airplane engine: the Engine Alliance GP7000 turbofan engine, capable of pushing 81,500 pounds of force (36,980 kgf or 363 kN) at full thrust.
Image by AP/Jessica Hill, Jens Meyer
The open rotor and combustion chamber of a much powerful engine, the SGT5-4000F gas turbine.
Image by Siemens AG
The interior of another familiar shuttle friend: NASA's 747 mothership.
Images by NASA
A naked and obsolete (super) computer: Cray Y-MP at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Images by LLNL
More engines: the CPR 8000 steam locomotive's water tube boiler and firebox is a crazily complex plumbing job.
Image by Brass Goggles
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.
Image curation by Attila Nagy