Tag: ships

tfmatrix:

tfprotomorph:

would cybertronians even feel the need to develop faster-than-light ships??? They live millions of years. Sure it takes a long time to get places but they also have effective stasis so for million light year journies they can go in stasis?? Like 50 years between stars is barely anything to them. That’s not even bringing space bridges into it (which I’ve elected to use sparingly in protomorph)… But if they do have both space bridges, effective stasis that can extend lifespans, and they live millions of years without using that stasis there’s not actually any incentive to develop FTL travel

I actually think about this a lot. I figure that they were relatively “late” to develop any sort of FTL travel beyond spacebridges because for a long time…what was the point?

Although the first few times Cybertronian explorers came back after millennia travelling only to find out the entire political arena (or geography) of their homeworld had been torn down and rearranged by warfare or invasion it got old real fast. In Matrix, they only adopted true FTL travel (although some shuttleformers and other flying types were capable of transwarp speed naturally) as response to keeping up with the largely shorter-lived but faster interstellar community.

Mostly they just wanted to stop getting invaded by other species who could pop back and forth between their world and Cybertron real fast. The fun gets taken out of warfare if your defensive strike wouldn’t show up until a few millennia after they actually invaded you.

Basically, in Matrix FTL only got popular because of “keeping up with the Joneses” and sheer, pure impatience.

(A common practice prior to this however was sending cyberforming “seeds” or crews to alien worlds using high-cost FTL then launching a more standard ship of future colonists- and in a few thousand years when they arrived the planet would be finished cyberforming and ready for habitation!)