Tag: decepticons

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Just sitting here thinking about the implications of it being G1 canon that red optics are a sign of starvation, which is brought up once and never mentioned again

For everyone going “what”, in S3 (The Dweller in the Depths, which is about the previous slave race the Quintessons made that didn’t quite work out… There’s a lot going on here, okay), there’s a monster that sucks all the energy out of tfs, leaving them as shambling zombielike empties and instantly turning their optics red. Apparently that’s what happens when you run out of fuel.

tbh it probably wasn’t intentional worldbuilding (most of G1 is a fever dream held together with paper clips and string), but since this is the season that keeps trying to convince us the Decepticons are a huge evil force when most of what they’re doing is hanging out on a crappy asteroid without anything to eat… ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Okay one way to jury rig G1’s worldbuilding back into something sensible would be to say the Decepticons artificially give themselves red optics as a political statement about the cause

Yeah, it doesn’t make too much sense that all of the Decepticons are actively starving all the time, except for Swindle, Dirge, and the Stunticons. But I’d believe it as an aesthetic thing. “We are hungry and we are here for your fuel! (and then we will take over the universe!)” is pretty much the G1 Decepticon mission statement a lot of the time.

(It’s been a bit since I’ve seen the relevant scenes, but I believe the red optics go back to the original Quintesson military hardware line, though. Which, you know, G1. It does tie into my grand unified G1 theory that the ‘Cons overall have greater fuel needs than the ‘Bots, to power their flight and weapons systems and such. The Quints might have been underfueling them as well, deliberately or not.)

Semi-Related but I like the idea that optic color is determined by a lot of environmental factors when the Cybertronian is first being forged or is developing out of sparkling-dom.

This is pseudo-science but longer wavelengths have lower energy. So maybe, when being forged, if there’s less energy/resources available in the area red optics are developed to save energy. 

So maybe it’s not so much that the cons are always starving, just that the majority of them underwent their short developmental years without access to surplus energon. 

(Side note: I think the ‘symbolic red optics’ are totally metal, but I also can’t see the cons having the resources to switch everyone’s optic color just for that reason. I can see it being a mix of reasons, like if you’re a con and your optics aren’t red and yellow you get them switched to save energy, make a statement, and be better accepted by the troops)

Yeah, to be clear I don’t think the cons were actually starving all the time (except in season 3, when that was the plot, and they even joined up with their old masters the quintessons for a while because the quints showed up like “we’ve got fuel” and the Decepticons went “seems legit!”. wtf, season 3). It’s just a weird little implication along with the whole 80s energy crisis subtext. But! On the topic of fueling military hardware, let’s compare, say… Starscream and Powerglide.

We’ll ignore fiction and go for real-world measurements. G1 Starscream is an F-15 Eagle, and Powerglide’s an A-10 Thunderbolt II. Unfueled, an F-15 weighs 15.8 tons to an A-10′s 14.5. An A-10 can carry 5.5 tons of fuel, about a third of its own weight.

A fully-fueled F-15 weighs 40.5 tons.

That’s almost double its own weight in fuel, holy shit. Multiply that by the number of seekers in the armada and the energy costs must be insane. I can see the Decepticons being hungry all the time on rations that would feed an Autobot nicely, just because being ‘full’ is a wildly different thing.