Military Engineering

More and more space arks are landing on Lumera. The humans' new home is breathtakingly beautiful, but dangerous plants and bestial predators punish every careless step. Sophisticated aliens keep themselves hidden, and they may be superior to humans. The human colony is beset by internal conflict. A civil war threatens.

We're Doomed, Now What? addresses the crisis that is our time through a series of brilliant, moving, and original essays on climate change, war, literature, and loss from one of the most provocative and iconoclastic minds of his generation.

Kristen Iversen grew up in a small Colorado town close to Rocky Flats, a secret nuclear weapons plant once designated "the most contaminated site in America." Full Body Burden is the story of a childhood and adolescence in the shadow of the Cold War, in a landscape at once startlingly beautiful and--unknown to those who lived there--tainted with invisible yet deadly particles of plutonium.

They were told as little as possible. Their orders were to go to Santa Fe, New Mexico, and report for work at a classified Manhattan Project site, a location so covert it was known to them only by the mysterious address: 109 East Palace.

In the aftermath of World War II, the United States accelerated the development of technologies that would give it an advantage over the Soviet Union. Airpower, combined with nuclear weapons, offered a formidable check on Soviet aggression. In 1947, the United States Air Force was established. Meanwhile, scientists and engineers were pioneering a revolutionary new type of aircraft which could do what no other machine had ever done: reach mach 1 - a speed faster than the movement of sound - which pilots called "the demon."

America's highest military award, the Congressional Medal of Honor, was awarded to 440 deserving members of the "Greatest Generation" that served in World War II. But in 1943, before the war was even over, Allied leaders realized they needed another kind of award to recognize a different kind of World War II hero - animal heroes. Founded in 1943, the prestigious PDSA Dickin Medal is the highest award an animal can achieve for gallantry and bravery in the field of military conflict. It was given to 55 animals who served valiantly alongside the members of the Greatest Generation.

Built in 1927, the German ocean liner Cap Arcona was the greatest ship since the Titanic. When the Nazis seized control, she was stripped down for use as a floating barracks and troop transport. Hitler's minister, Joseph Goebbels, later cast her as a "star" in the epic propaganda film about the sinking of the legendary Titanic. In the Third Reich's final desperate days, when SS Cap Arcona was mistakenly bombed by the British Air Force, concentration camp prisoners packed the ship.

July 1967: At the Moscow Air Show, the Soviets unveiled six new state-of-the-art aircraft. From among this lineup of new fighters and interceptors stood the Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-25 - purportedly capable of outrunning and outmaneuvering any aircraft in NATO’s inventory. Yet even before its public appearance in Moscow, the MiG-25 had been a grave concern for Western analysts.

The epic story of the engineers and rail workers who ensured Allied victory in World War Two, published to coincide with the eightieth anniversary of D-Day, by an award-winning expert on trains and transportation.

You probably don't realize that your supermarket is filled with foods that have a military origin: canned goods, packaged deli meats, TV dinners, cling wrap, energy bars…the list is almost endless. In fact, there's a watered-down combat ration lurking in practically every bag, box, can, bottle, jar, and carton Americans buy. Anastacia Marx de Salcedo shows how the Department of Defense Combat Feeding Directorate plans, funds, and spreads the food science that enables it to produce cheap, imperishable rations.

An unbelievable series of events led to the establishment of the Northwest Electro-development Laboratory, later the U.S. Bureau of Mines Albany Research Center. Though the fledgling lab had difficulty securing staff due to World War II, world-renown metallurgist William J. Kroll was hired early on as a consultant after fleeing Nazi occupation. Kroll, who had pioneered a method for producing commercial titanium, worked with his core group of associates to develop malleable zirconium, just as a need arose for the little-known metal.

Many veterans of war, upon their return home, choose to never speak about their time serving in the military, hoping to put it behind them and forget. But some veterans don’t hesitate to share their stories and experiences with anyone who will listen. Whether talking about it is their way of coping with what they witnessed and endured, an effort to pass on to the next generation a small slice of history, or an attempt to preserve the memories for themselves, doesn’t really matter.

In der Dunkelheit des Imperium Nihilus, wo eine halbe Million Welten vom schummrigen Licht des Heiligen Terra abgeschnitten ist, wird ein neues Leuchtfeuer geboren. Der Rote Engel ist in eine unvorbereitete Galaxis zurückgekehrt, und überall folgen seine verstreuten Söhne dem Aufruf zum Blutbad. An Bord der Bezwinger, des bösartigen Flaggschiffes der World Eaters, bemüht sich Kossolax der Abgeschworene, selbst ernannter Lordregent der XII., den alten Traum der Legion aufrechtzuhalten.

When the Marines decided to buy a helicopter-airplane hybrid "tiltrotor" called the V-22 Osprey, they saw it as their dream machine. The tiltrotor was the aviation equivalent of finding the Northwest Passage: an aircraft able to take off, land, and hover with the agility of a helicopter yet fly as fast and as far as an airplane. Many predicted it would reshape civilian aviation. The Marines saw it as key to their very survival. Opponents called it one of the worst boondoggles in Pentagon history.

A thrilling tale of mecha warfare in the outer reaches of space. Where only the strongest will survive. Glory, a disgraced young mecha pilot from Phaeton dreams of returning to the military. One mistake ruined her career, leaving her with nothing but mining operations in the distant regions of the Enclave. Memories of piloting state of the art mechs seem far from reach. Everything changes the day she finds a robotic warrior long thought lost, only to be attacked by a group of armored warriors keen to retrieve it.

Science and violence converge in modern warfare. While the finest minds of the 20th century have improved human life, they have also produced human injury. They engineered radar, developed electronic computers, and helped mass produce penicillin all in the context of military mobilization. Scientists also developed chemical weapons, atomic bombs, and psychological warfare strategies. Rational Fog explores the quandary of scientific and technological productivity in an era of perpetual war.

Hidden, buried deep within the government's archived files of failed military experiments lays a troubling secret. For years, 1953 to 1972 to be exact, a team of doctors and scientists tried unsuccessfully to alter test subjects, hoping to build living, organic weapons for the future. Eventually the project was disbanded, labeled an abject failure - but they were wrong - it just took the passage of time and altered DNA.

In the 1960s humans took their first steps away from Earth - and for a time our possibilities in space seemed endless. But in a time of austerity, and in the wake of high-profile disasters like Challenger, that dream has ended. In early 2011 Margaret Lazarus Dean traveled to Cape Canaveral for NASA's last three space shuttle launches in order to bear witness to the end of an era.

The war rages on, sparking the worst wildfires the country has ever seen. The descendants of the genetically engineered animals once filling Pangaea, the former dinosaur park, are forced by the fires to flee throughout Mexico, causing chaos. In the midst of this, La Fuerza struggles for a victory, for its very existence, and its brutal soldiers are willing to do whatever it takes to get a win. A mercenary with a bounty on his head and the billionaire's daughter he protects seem like easy targets.

William L. Laurence was fascinated with atomic science and its militarization. When the Manhattan Project drew near to perfecting the atomic bomb, he was recruited to write much of the government's press materials that were distributed on the day that Hiroshima was obliterated. That instantly crowned Laurence as one of the leading journalistic experts on the atomic bomb.