Here are ten machines that are so enormous that they'll screw with your sense of what's large, what's small, and what is truly gigantic—each handily put into scale.

A fair bit longer than the Eiffel Tower laid flat, is how big. [DarkRoasted Blend]

The Komatsu 9xx Series mining trucks look a bit like Tonka toys. No, they look exactly like Tonka toys. [MiningTopNews]

24-foot-tall Tonka toys, mind you. [E-Transport.ro]

Howard Hughes' ill-conceived, ill-fated Spruce Goose has always been fascinating to me. HAY GUYS, LET'S MAKE A PLANE OUT OF WOOD! WHAT COULD GO WRONG? [Colorado U]

Along with being a hugely strange idea, it was hugely huge. That's the 1019-ft Queen Mary cruise ship, for reference. [DriveArchive]

The Bagger 288 strip-mining machine has gained plenty of notoriety on the internet, mainly on account of looking like it was designed to kill. It isn't, at all, but you can't fault us for jumping to conclusions. Look at it! [DRB]

The general public's unease about this horror machine won't be helped by the fact that it's large enough to saw large ships in half, and gobble up a bulldozer without so much as flinching. [Wikimedia]

Old Soviet military hardware is incredibly interesting—a vestige of a time when both of the world's superpowers applied their distinctively different philosophies to a race to design some of the most ridiculous machines ever created. But surely this photo of a Typhoon Class submarine is just the victim of some zoom lens distortion, right? [DGIBNET]

Ha ha, not at all. Those there are humans, see? [Webpark.ru]

The Space Shuttle Conveyor is a literally-named, track-driven machine that you've probably seen before, saddled with one of NASA's various, now-dormant spacecraft. But it's hard to even judge how big the shuttle is, much less its ride. [NASA]

As you probably guessed, it's inconceivably gigantic.

The B-2 Bomber is another familiar piece of hardware, but one that is usually pictured without comparison, flying through the air, looking secretive. It's a stealth plane, and it's shaped like a Styrofoam glider, so I always imagined it as fairly lithe. [Af.mil]

It's actually startlingly large, with a wingspan of over 172ft. [OklahomaCity on Flickr]

Anyone with knowledge of power generation can tell you that it's no wimpy windmill that can pump out six megawatts of power, and that this windmill must be fairly substantial.

Whether they'll be able to find the words to fully describe how substantial it is is another matter entirely. Those orange specks peeking out of the fan's face like insects? Those are maintenance workers. [Giz]

At first glance the Knock Nevis supertanker, with its weird name and goofy-large "No Smoking" sign below the officer's deck, looks like your average cargo ship: Pretty big, pretty flat and and pretty boring. [Wikimedia]

Far from it: The largest ship in the world, measuring in at over 1,500 feet long, ole' Nevis is a floating city. [DamnCoolPics]

The Mil Mi-26 is one of the classic sense-of-scale killers, since its proportions are almost exactly like a regular helicopter, just bigger. How much bigger? [Wikimedia]

That little black thing hanging from the Mi-26's hook there is a Chinook, which is nearly a hundred feet long. [Aerospaceweb]

I'm no warmonger, nor am I a motorcycle fiend, but I can appreciate both a landmark plane with an iconic design and a lavishly expensive bike all the same.

Yet when I look at this B-2 bike, all I can think is, the US Airforce actually spent money on that?

How about we commemorate 20 years of the B-2 bomber with, say, the uber-badass B-2 bomber? Who cares that this bike has some of the original titanium from the original B-2 aft deck or that each wheel features some stupid scale models of B-2s in star formations? What's next, B-2 collectible cards in the spokes?

I look at this motorcycle and can only reminisce of the short-lived Street Sharks cartoon/toy campaign. It's a caricature of America's historical techno-military supremacy, but an unintentional one at that. [Northrop Grumman via Gizmowatch]

Head to Popular Mechanics to see the official timeline of the crash. [Popular Mechanics]

Three percent of all the electronic components in the world become obsolete every month. When you imagine all the shit coming out of China, it's pretty staggering. The problem is actually worse for the military, which spends about $10 billion a year on keeping up obsolete electronics parts. Ironically it's because they've switched to using off-the-shelf consumer electronics for 90 percent of their components—with a much shorter service life, four years at best—rather than "military-spec" gear, which was designed to hang around for a decade or more.

IEEE Spectrum lists a couple of egregious examples: The B-2 Spirit, one of Jesus' favorite planes, started flying in 1989, and by 1996, lots of its electronic components were obsolete. And in the Navy's new sonar system, 70 percent of the parts were obsolete when they started installing it.

Finding the parts isn't just difficult, it's expensive as hell, so the cost of maintaining obsolete but very necessary wares basically keeps you from upgrading. In the NYC subway case, instead of moving to a new, modern computerized system that would probably be cheaper in the long run, the Metropolitan Transit Authority has had to focus its limited budget on maintaining the frail, antediluvian network, trapping New Yorkers into an transit system light years behind, say, Japan's. (There have been stories in the recent past about the subway's upgrades, but they have mainly been superficial.)

Not all of you depend on the subway, or fly B-2 bombers, so here's a closer to home example: Windows vs. OS X. The latter is lighter, faster and springier, because it dumped all of the Classic OS's code. A fresh start, with a transition eased by the Classic emulation scheme. Windows Vista, on the other hand, is burdened by 20 years of legacy code, code that it could be argued is essentially obsolete. So we pay the price with a bloated operating system that struggles under its own massive girth. Dumping all that dead weight for Windows 7 and starting fresh—while painful—would be the best thing Microsoft could do. But it's not that easy, or they'd have done it, obviously. Maybe. You got any better examples of painful obsolescence? [IEEE Spectrum, NYT]