Washington Post 2013 was a big year for unmanned vehicles. The word "drone" became so common that manufacturers, unhappy with the term's close linkage to targeted strikes in faraway regions, began waging a quiet campaign of their own to stop people from saying it out loud. Yes, it's a silly kind of public relations battle. But the industry has a point: This was the year that we became aware of drones as more than killing machines. We started to understand how they might reshape commerce and transportation and even ethics. Below, six moments in 2013 that pushed drones into the public spotlight.

Gear Materials: Selection, Metallurgy, Heat Treatment, and Quality Control Ideally, the design of an optimum gear set requires the coordinated effort of the gear design engineer, the gear metallurgist and the bearing system engineer.

Washington Post Sometime early next year, Boeing will make one state very happy and more than a dozen others very sad. It will select the location for a new manufacturing plant to build its 777X airliner, gifting what it promises will be thousands of good-paying jobs to the winner.

Manufacturing.net News that ThyssenKrupp planned to sell the $5 billion mill just five years after it opened sent a ripple through the region, which depended on well-paying jobs related to the mill throughout the economic downturn. ThyssenKrupp has said its plan to import steel slabs from its plant in Brazil fell apart because of the recession and increasing production costs in Brazil.

Manufacturing.net Cessna Aircraft parent company Textron Inc. said Thursday it will buy Beechcraft Corp. for approximately $1.4 billion, a deal that would combine two mainstays of Wichita's general aviation industry. The announcement by Providence, R.I.-based Textron caps a year that saw Beechcraft emerge from bankruptcy largely freed from debt and its unprofitable Hawker business jet operations, which it stopped making to focus on turboprop and piston aircraft as well as trainers and light attack planes for the military.

IndustryWeek Industrial conglomerate Textron IW 1000/380 announced it has agreed to pay $1.4 billion to purchase business and defense plane builder Beechcraft in a cash deal. The transaction is due to be finalized in the first half of 2014, subject to regulatory approvals and closing conditions, the companies said.

CNN Money The latest in robotics was on display the past few days at a racetrack just south of Miami, Fla., part of a $2 million competition funded by the U.S. military. Engineering teams from high-tech companies and top universities showed off their designs, ranging from crawling models that look like spiders to heavy, hulking humanoids.

Mining.com Chile’s finance minister, Felipe Larrain, said Monday the government is handing state-owned miner Codelco an extra $1 billion in financing to help the world’s No. 1 copper producer move forward with its decisive investment plans.

Manufacturing.net Volkswagen Group announced today that it has grown by about 248,000 employees, representing a rise of 76 percent, since 2007. 123,000 of those are new jobs created around the world, and 125,000 are from employees of companies acquired during that period and integrated into the larger group.