Background

As described on the Osprey Publishing website, “Waterloo is one of the defining campaigns of European history. The name conjures up images of the terrible scale and grandeur of the Napoleonic Wars and the incredible combined effort that finally ended Napoleon's aspirations of power in Europe. Drawn from unpublished first-hand accounts, and using detailed illustrations, this comprehensive volume is the ideal resource for studying the intense fighting at the battles of Waterloo and Wavre, the final, decisive engagements of the Waterloo campaign. Those two battles are at the heart of this study, which explores the action at Mont St Jean where Wellington managed to hold the French at bay until the arrival of the Prussians under Blücher saw the Allies secure a hard-fought victory at the dramatic climax of the ‘Hundred days'”.

The Space Shuttle (actual name “Space Transportation System) was a reusable manned low Earth orbit vehicle. It consisted of the space plane which went into orbit and glided back to Earth, two Solid Rocket Boosters and the expendable fuel tank.

Shuttles were operated by NASA from 1981 to 2011, flying a total of 135 missions.

The missions ranged from launching satellites and interplanetary probes to delivering components for the International Space Station, and later delivering supplies and crew for the ISS.

There were originally 5 shuttles built, Enterprise, which had no orbital capability, Challenger, Columbia, Discovery and Atlantis. After Challenger was destroyed, Endeavour was built.

Background

The website description of this title, “At the start of the 20th century the Ottoman Navy was a shadow of its former might, a reflection of the empire as a whole - the "Sick Man of Europe". Years of defeat, nepotism, and neglect had left the Ottoman Navy with a mix of obsolete vessels, whilst the list of prospective enemies was ever-growing. An increasing Russian naval presence in the Black Sea and the alarming emergence of Italy and Greece as regional Naval powers proved beyond all doubt that intensive modernization was essential, indeed, the fate of the Empire as a naval power depended on it. So the Ottoman Navy looked to the ultimate naval weapon of the age, the dreadnought, two of which were ordered from the British. But politics intervened, and a succession of events culminated in the Ottoman Navy fielding a modern German battlecruiser and state-of-the-art light cruiser instead - with dramatic consequences.

Mushroom Model Publication has released the second volume of the Finnish Fighter Color series. You can find a review of Volume 1 here on the reviews site.

This book, as Volume 1, is structured by aircraft type. Each aircraft type has two chapters. The first one is devoted to the historical introduction on each type including how it was procured and how it did perform in Finnish service. In many cases there are plenty of historical details on different missions including date, location, number of airplanes involved and mission kills/losses. There are no first-hand narratives of pilots involved in the action, so I suppose the information is coming from squadron records.

Introduction

Since late in the Korean war, into the Vietnam War, and even more importantly today, one of the most important missions within the United States Air Force and Navy is the suppression of enemy air defense systems. Blinding the enemy air defenses was and still is crucial to clearing the road for massive bombing campaigns and air superiority. In the United States Air Force, this mission went to a group aptly named the wild weasels. Much like a weasel, the job of these aircraft is to stick their head up and get the enemy air defense systems to see and lock their radar on the aircraft. When the electronic systems in the weasel aircraft indicate the enemy is locked on you, you would launch your anti-radiation missile to ride the enemy radar beam back to the antenna it was broadcasting from. Once in proximity of the antenna, the missile would detonate releasing thousands of bits of steel shrapnel, shredding the enemy radar antenna thus blinding the enemy.