Engineering Bay: infantry research center of the terran military

The engineering bay was a terran research structure devoted to improving the quality of the weapons and armor fielded by infantry. The buildings were in use by the Terran Confederacy as early as 2488, and they outlived the government that first raised them. Under the Terran Dominion the engineering bay held a fixed place in military doctrine as one of the first two research facilities established whenever a strike force made planetfall, the other being the armory. Wherever terran soldiers dug in, from Confederate campaigns through the Great War and beyond, the engineering bay stood behind the fighting line, keeping the rifles firing and the combat suits sealed.

The soldier's laboratory#

Where the armory looked after the machines of a terran army, the engineering bay looked after the soldier. Its researchers worked to improve the quality of the weapons and armor carried by terran infantry, the equipment on which every marine in a firing line depended. That mandate covered the whole of a footsoldier's kit, from the gauss rifles that defined terran infantry firepower to the CMC powered combat suits that kept their wearers alive in environments ranging from vacuum to zerg infested ruins.

The institution was older than the Dominion itself. Engineering bays were in use by the Terran Confederacy as early as 2488, years before the Great War brought the protoss and the zerg into the sector's affairs, and the structure passed intact from Confederate service into the armed forces that succeeded it. Whatever government held power in the Koprulu sector, its soldiers carried equipment that had passed through an engineering bay.

Doctrine of the Dominion Armed Forces#

Within the Dominion Armed Forces the engineering bay was written directly into the order of battle. Whenever a strike force was deployed planetside, the engineering bay was one of two key research facilities to be established in a field base as soon as possible. The other was the armory, and between them the two structures divided the whole of terran materiel. The engineering bay improved the quality of infantry weapons, while the armory developed better materials for the weapons and armor of vehicles and starships, from siege tanks to capital ships.

The two facilities worked in partnership rather than in isolation. The most advanced improvements to infantry equipment pursued in an engineering bay depended on materials work conducted in an armory, so the ceiling of a base's infantry research rose and fell with the presence of its sister facility. A field base that raised both structures early could push its soldiers' weapons and armor forward together, which was precisely why Dominion doctrine demanded both be established without delay.

Flight and the grounded generations#

The engineering bay of the Great War era was a mobile installation. Like several other terran structures of the period, the bays were equipped with the ability to lift off and move to a new location, allowing a field base to pull its research facilities out of danger or push them forward behind an advancing front.

That mobility did not survive the Brood War. In the years that followed, the engineering capabilities of the structure were improved, the personnel assigned to it increased, and the intricacy of their work deepened. The heavier, more sophisticated facility that resulted was no longer cleared for flight, and the grounded engineering bay became the standard for the Dominion era. What the structure lost in mobility it gained in the depth of the research carried out inside its walls.

Experimental bays and stranger work#

Not every engineering bay in the sector confined itself to conventional research. The Dominion Special Forces operated experimental engineering bays that made use of AIs, and the machines increased the pace of research by fighting each other in simulated battles, a constant war inside the facility that sharpened the equipment carried into the real one.

The Knights of Tyrador put a portion of their engineering bays to a different purpose altogether. On a world known for its resorts, some of the order's bays were used to research new amusement park attractions, an assignment that continued until the Battle of Tyrador IX, after which the work was temporarily suspended.

The engineering bay at Project Blackstone#

The engineering bay was not only a fixture of field bases. The Dominion research installation that housed Project Blackstone counted an engineering bay among its sections, alongside laboratories, a machine shop, an analysis platform, and the other workings of a major research facility. In February of 2505, while the project's systems were still being brought online, the scientists Red Quinton and Pamela Foster worked together in the facility's engineering bay.

Two days after they began, ethanol was detected in the bay. The facility's adjutant responded by shutting the section down, and the lockout temporarily stranded Quinton inside. The incident passed without lasting harm, but it illustrated the place the engineering bay occupied in terran life: a working space at the center of any serious research effort, monitored, regulated, and never far from the machinery that governed the installation around it.