Unprofessional Engineering

Unprofessional Engineering is built on a joke it never drops: James and Luke present themselves as the least qualified people to explain engineering, then explain it anyway. The result sits somewhere between a history lesson and two friends teasing each other. The subjects range widely. There are episodes on how golf balls are made, how nuclear fusion works, how to become an astronaut, and Lockheed Martin, covered both as a company and through its F-22 Raptor. The golf ball conversation covers testing materials on small batches, field research, and the gap between what tour pros need and what ordinary golfers need. A tour ball, they explain, is unforgiving unless it is struck cleanly. Fusion gets a patient walk through the Coulomb force and nuclear binding energy, ending on why light elements such as hydrogen and helium release energy when they fuse. The astronaut episode goes back to 1959, when the first astronauts came from the military, flew jets, had engineering backgrounds and had to be under five foot eleven to fit inside the small Mercury spacecraft. The pair pounce on that height rule as the one time being short would have helped them. Aviation keeps coming back. The Lockheed Martin history moves through the C-130 Hercules, the C-141 StarLifter, the C-5 Galaxy and the P-3 Orion, stopping to marvel at how fast those designs went from concept to finished aircraft. The company's tagline is read out and gently mocked. In the F-22 episode, the Raptor is jokingly declared practically identical to the Wright brothers' plane, apart from its radar signature. That episode also wanders into a comparison of electricity to flowing water, along with help from someone named Mike that arrived, one of them grumbles, twenty years too late to save a failed electrical engineering class. Side trips like that are part of the fun, along with passing jokes about frozen chickens and about starting a Twitter account just to lobby for a topic. Listeners do shape what gets covered: the return to fusion came from a write-in the pair call convincing, or annoying, depending on who is asked. At sign-off, listeners are invited to email in with corrections, praise or ideas. Some topics run as series, such as Companies That Built the World, and the pair also remember Christmas episodes about nerd toys fondly. One episode, 'All Good Things Must Come to an End - Episode 341', is framed as a farewell. In it they pick favorite series, name the SR-71 and the Concorde among the highlights, and revisit the backlash to their BattleBots episode. It ends with an attempt to sing a song lyric while deliberately skipping the words they have decided not to say. What a listener gets is real engineering and history from two people who would rather trade jabs than sound authoritative.