i can only sometimes control the rivets

There's always the most powerful mass-produced piston aero engine in the US, the Pratt & Whitney R-4360 Wasp Major: (Wikipedia article). A 28-cylinder, 4-row radial engine capable of 4500 horsepower:

 

Or there's the wonderful Napier Deltic engines, which are built in an inverted triangle of three double-ended cylinders per bank, with a crankshaft on each corner.




Some other weird and fascinating piston engines on this thread.

 

@Morven I LOVE YOU

 

Douglas Self's pages, the Museum of Retrotechnology, are also full of weird and wonderful gadgets, especially transportation and power generation ones. Monowheel cycles!

 

A character of mine in the pan-fandom RP drives essentially this:



which in the real world is a 1948 Talbot-Lago Type 26 Grand Sport. Isn't it beautiful?

(not sure how good a car they actually were, but the design is top-notch, and perfect for a car showoff in a dieselpunk-ish world)

 

I do not even sperg over machines but something about VCR's is deeply satisfying.

Spoiler: Videos

 

I owned one of these for about 4 years. 1967 Ford Thunderbird four-door with suicide doors in the back. Seven liters of engine. Cruises comfortably at 100mph. A solid lump of American steel with odd space-age styling and a pretty standard Ford drivetrain for the time (428 cubic inch FE pushrod V8, 4-barrel carburetor, C6 3-speed automatic transmission) but, alas, pretty much everything else was custom for these and finding things like trim parts these days is almost impossible.


Everything is powered by vacuum. 4-door power door locks? Vacuum. Remote trunk release? Vacuum. Headlight covers, same. And a bunch of other stuff. The windshield wipers are hydraulic, on the same circuit as the power steering. No intermittent setting but you can have it as low as you like. It had sequential tail lights for turn signals; the rear lightbar is full width and the three segments on one side light in sequence, inner then inner+middle and then finally all three. This is driven by an electric motor turning cams that pressed on switches, though you can now get an electronic replacement for it.

I'd own another. But I want to be richer first.

 

Electronic makes everything simpler and smarter. Automatic transmissions had essentially a hydraulically-powered brain until recent times, and those things (the "valve body") are complicated arrangements of springs, check balls and pistons that decide what gear should be in use and when to shift.

 

The Brough Superior Golden Dream, which would have been 1939's motorcycle sensation except World War 2 happened. Only eight were built, of which at least three survive. This is the only one in the production configuration to survive; the others are rougher looking, bare-bones without mudguards or most of the other cosmetic niceties. It may well be the most valuable motorcycle in the world. Standard production Brough Superiors in good condition are worth a quarter million dollars; I cannot even imagine what this one would be worth if it was ever sold. But it's in a museum and probably never will be.

The engine is a stacked 4; essentially two "boxer" type pairs on top of each other, geared to a common output shaft. Shaft drive. In general amazingly cool for its time. You could pretty much ride this to a modern cruiser bike meet and not look out of place.

One of my characters in the cross-fandom RP has essentially this as her ride of choice.

 

Only mostly related, but SpaceX just successfully landed a Falcon 9 first stage! Woohoo!

Edit: Adding a picture of the landed stage, from their Twitter account.

Spoiler

 

I think that counts as a cool machine so not off topic :)

 

sooooo satisfying to watch

 

The Pennyslvania Railroad's final express passenger steam locomotives, class T1. The top one is one of the two prototypes, built in 1942, while the others are part of the production batch of 50, built in 1945-46. The odd "shark-nose" streamlining was by famed industrial designer Raymond Loewy. Unfortunately, the PRR made the wrong bet; competing roads were buying shiny diesel locomotives, and by 1948 the PRR board decided to replace steam with diesel on all top-flight trains, post-haste. The T1s, complex and tricky to drive and maintain, were really not suited for secondary service and by 1952 all were out of service, before they were even fully paid for.

They remain a controversial topic among railroad enthusiasts.

Detractors point to their many problems, including a propensity for wheelslip on the front engine, and easily-damaged, hard-to-fix Franklin oscillating-cam poppet valve-gear.

Fans of the type point out that by they were in service the PRR board had already lost faith in the whole concept, and believe that management deliberately exaggerated its problems to save face.

 

It really is! Some people hate the styling but I think it's the most beautifully aggressive and menacing thing, it just oozes power and complexity.

There is actually a group raising money to build a new one in the modern age, purely to prove the detractors wrong, and at least pipedreaming about getting the steam speed record with it. US railroads, possibly worried about liability, had given up on speed records by the 1930s even though there were quite a few reasonable contenders to Mallard's crown, including the T1 as well as the Milwaukee Road's A1 and F7 classes, the latter with a design speed of 125mph (Mallard's record speed).


(Milwaukee F7)

 

Meanwhile the South Australian Railways attempted the T1's styling for their 520 class, which looks like its somewhat ungainly green cousin: