Why wasn't another search party sent out to look for the Transformers that crashed landed on Earth? Why did Megatron and Optimus regain control of the 'Cons and 'Bots so easily that were still on Cybertron after 4 million years some new leaders should have arisen.
First part, probably because nobody besides the future Maximals and Predacons knew where they were at in that time. Had one of them had known that something had happened and where they were at, I'm sure either Prime or Megatron's team would not had came back online.
Cartoon is stupid about it. When Shockwave said, "Cybertron will remains as you left it," he literally meant it! Comics were better about it. But realistically in the cartoon, why would a search party go to Earth? Neither the Bots nor the Cons in the starships planned on going to Earth. It wasn't on their flight path (presumably), they just arrive there by pure accident (even though the gravitational pull of Jupiter would have been much stronger and far more likely to pull the ships to if the asteroid belt was our asteroid belt, causing the Ark and Nemesis to crush from the pressure of a gas giant - the remains that didn't burn up of course, but that's just astrophysics, who needs that in a cartoon?). Anyway, it's all accident they hit Earth. No one on Cybertron knew where Prime+Co were, the importantce of, and maybe the existence of, Earth, and had no reason to come here. Beyond that, there was a huge energy crisis. Perhaps the cartoon had it so there were no other ships sent out, since there's so little to fuel them. Of course, you can't think of anything that contradicts that - such as Transformers being all over the galaxy in the cartoon as early as season 2, or people like Kup or the guys that would become the *Masters never being seen anywhere on Cybertron prior to their toy introduction, or....well.... Suffice it to say, the 4 million year bit is pretty bupkis.
It is highly possible that the G1 TF's had absolutely no idea where they were, as TF's are notorious for not fully understanding where or when their Transwarp has brought them.
Even as someone who grew up on G1, the whole "millions" of years thing always bugged me. I actually like the movie timeline of about 25k years on the more pertinent points of the series.
during that 4 million yr time, didnt cybertron shut down to regernate some power, in which both sides went to sleep?
The thing is, and if you read the OP, it didn't. He was asking about the cartoon. The Great Shutdown happened ONLY in the Dreamwave comics, decades AFTER the toon ended. Well, a decade and some change. Either way, that did not happen in the cartoon or the Marvel comics, both of which the OP was interested in. Which is good. Cause that was just stupid. Prime+Co sleep, so everyone else does? What next, when Prime offs himself for losing a video game again, everyone else dies too? More to the point (and more seriously), 4 million years without doing anything would cause a hell of a lot of rust, a lot of decay, even more energy loss (you don't make energy by turning it off, you just stop using it. You make more energy by making more energy. Cybertron would have the same energy it had after the GS as it did before, and in all likelyhood, far far less). And what about aliens? In all the comics and s3 of the toon, the TFs are everywhere and well known across space, and they got a lot of enemies. In four million years, not one of those enemies decided to strike Cybertron and kill everyone in a coma? Really? The GS is BS.
Watch the first episode. The Decepticons attack and board the ship, no one was at the controls.The ship came to close to earths gravitational field, and got pulled down.
Only in Dreamwave. But as shown with Devcon and Files of Teletran-One on the Autobots the Bots have mostly scattered throughout the galaxy. Some like Kup's group were in the hundreds. Some like Elita-1's group provide token resistance to the Decepticons on Cybertron. Decepticons also expanded their reach. Like shaking crime boss Gyconi of Monacus for Energon profits and enslaving the Tlalakans.
The Ark crashed because the Con ship attacked it, and it was too damaged to fly under its own power. What dragged it down is what drags everything down: Gravity. But like I said above, the gravitational pull of Jupiter would have had far greater influence on the ships than Earth would have. By a factor of like, hundreds. There's no realistic way that the two ships would have crashed on Earth if they went derelict in our asteroid belt. And if that asteroid belt was even further out, like the Oort cloud or further? They wouldn't even get into our solar system as derelicts, and if they did, Neptune, Uranus or Saturn would have likely pulled them in before Jupiter got to them. The only way they could have actually crashed on Earth, was if they were already in Earth orbit to begin with. Earth has a very very minor gravitational influence in the solar system, in comparison to everything else out there. Heck, things move below the orbit of our communications satellites and STILL do not hit Earth, that's how small our pull really is.
basically they couldn't find the energy, I think Jazz made some reference to it and then Prime decided to blast off in search, so presumably Cybertron was low on power, enough for the Autobots and Decepticons left behind to function but not enough for a ship to follow. Though Shockwave in his 1st appearance after More the Meets the Eye is busy wasting energon by shooting at stuff and makes a reference to contactingn Megatron, so either he's spent 4 millions on the phone or he's just really dumb
Shockwave did spend most of the time having Autobots, particularly female Autobots, killed. Heck he thought they were extinct.
I think if Dreamwave gave us anything other than hatred of Pat Lee, it was the concept of the Great Shutdown. The recent Exodus book has a similar event happen but uses it as the inciting incident to leave Cybertron, I wonder if we will see this reflected in TF rime.
