Sorry, I hope you didn't take it the wrong way. Wasn't trying to be an ass, but after I read it it seems like thats how it turned out.

 

Awesome discussion, guys! This is what TFGD should be like all the time. There's alot of details I've either forgotten about or never knew from BW. Keep it up guys.

 

I haven't actually gotten around to braeking out the DVD's, but I did an online search and found nothing substantial as to weather or not the TM driver reappears after BA's upgrade. I tend to think if it had happened I'd have found something.

So, taking back the part about the TM driver bonding Megatrons spark with his organic parts, I think it's clear something happened in that lava pool that prevented Megatron from sheding his organic form in BM. Therefore, I stand by everything else I said about why he hid his body thoughout most of BM.

I am still curious about what the fate the TM driver, and the catalyst for Megatrons transformation (er...or do I mean up-grade?) though. Anybody else have a theory or, better yet, some actual evidence from either series?

 

speaks the truth. yessss.

 

It makes me wonder if any of the Predacons/Maximals from the Beast Wars can purge their beast modes after having multiple forms.
Perhaps the transwarp wave mutated their bodies to the point where they can't be removed. When the virus was released on Cybertron, it put everyone in comatose state, except for the Axalon crew. But, the virus reverted them back, but didn't remove their beast modes. Maybe the virus was powerful enough to destroy the effects of the tranwarp, but no further.
Does this make any sense to anyone else but me?

 

Rhinox, Silverbolt and Waspinator were all reformated to Vehicons, no beast modes. None of them where ever changed in any way other than their initial reformating, though.

The transmetals semmed to be affected diffrently, or least more slowly. The transwarp wave seems to be the key to the "new transformers". In fact didn't orical state that this all happened for a reason around the middle of season 2 of BM?

 

yes, but I'm asking if any of the beast modes CAN be purged "manually" like Megatron's tried to character's that have had multiple forms. Also, the characters that were changed into vehicons, I assume their sparks were simply ripped and the body dumped somewhere

 

I usually just assume Megatron found it when he was in control of that alien base thingy.

 

I thought they had their sparks removed from their bodies and put into drones. Megatron initially tried to purge his beast/organic mode without removing his spark. Remember, it wasn't until the second season, or thereabouts, that he realized it was the only way to do it. Hence the birth of Noble Savage and Megahead.

 

they would have to be, since we see the drones before the generals. When Megatron gets frustrated, you see him raise 3 sparks from the chamber. So, the bodies were already gone. At that point he must have just put them in drone bodies.

 

The fact that Megatron had captured those 3 makes me think they were effected by the virus same as the rest of the TF's on cybertron. The only ones not effected were those that had undergone changes due to the experiments of the Vok, and, for some reason, Nightscream and Botanical (or whatever her name was). Since Rhinox, 'Bolt and Wasp' where only standard TF's with "synth-skin" (I always thought it was similar to a pretender shell) covering their bodies, the were not protected from the virus.

 

Was it ever explained how Nightscream was immune to the effects of the virus?

 

The other question watching that series made me ask was small is cybertron? This one bot can take over and control an entire planet? A city maybe but a planet?

 

Nightscream suvived by eating the fruit from the tree in the depths of Cybertron. The fruit counter-acted the virus but made him feral. When Optimus reformated him he "explained" that he just woke up one day with a beast mode. Whatever that means.

I think it was pretty well esablished that Cybertron is a relativly small planet, with a population in the tens of thousands at most. In G1 Megatron uses the space bridge to bring Cybertron into Earth's orbit and it looks to be a little more than twice the size of the moon. A planet that sized boasting a race as varied in size and structure as the TF's that's constantly in a state of energy crisis can't support to much life in any form.

 

Okay, I just had a weird thought here....when the Maximals returned to Cybertron through the time warp, they returned to present-day, when all Autobots and Decepticons were at war, correct? If so, Megatron could have created a way to grab G1 Galvatron from Earth or whatever planet he was on at the moment, and brought him to Cybertron to help him conquer it.

 

Incorrect. They returned to their present day, long after the end of the Autobot/Decepticon war.

 

no...they went back to their time period...when the maximals were on perhistoric earth...there is a scene where waspinator flys around saying he is shrapnel ...and blackarchnia says that shrapnel was from the great war 3 centuries ago(IE BEFORE THE MAXMIMAL/PREDACON time ....so the "the G1 war took place roughly 300 years before the beastwars cybertron period...when they hit the transwarp conduit they went back in time...when they left earth...they returned to the predacon/maximal time period....

 

Damn thats so right, never even thought of that, very good deduction.

 

I always interpreted the fact that he went to his base Beast mode because his spark retained some sort of imprint of his original mode.

 

Ah, but do we know if they were reformatted directly into Vehicons or had the Spark Extractor used on their helpless bodies? Remember, those 3 were never Transmetallized, so, according to what we're discussing here, didn't have the protections the others did.

Additionally, Cybertron was already home to Maximals and Predacons, and we don't know (except from the comics) if lots of others also had more organic-like beast modes. The odds are good some must have, and they were shut down just like everyone else.

It's almost assured he created the first three Generals from fabricated bodies and stored sparks with shell programs and no reformatting was needed at all.

Nightscream is also a poor example of, well...anything. They never did explain where his beast mode came from, because that's what let him eat the fruit. So really, he would have needed to have escaped Megatron's virus before gaining a beast mode, then he found the fruit and, well...let's forget about him, shall we?

But I think we can extrapolate a few things from what we did see of the other Transmetals to help explain Megatron's dilemma. Megatron was already a Transmetal 2, and we know that the other Transmetals didn't seize up and could only be reverted to their original beast modes at best. So we know that, at most, he could have brought himself back down to his original T. rex form from his crazy, merged, Transmetal 2 dragon form.

This is bad for several reasons.

One: It doesn't purge him of his now-hated beast mode.
Two: It's a very clear reduction in power at a time when dangerous enemies are loose on Cybertron.

He can't risk experimenting on himself under those circumstances. What the Maximals did made them truly technorganic, which is absolutely not what he wants for himself, so he won't even try.

He had to have known at this point, especially after creating the Generals, that only full spark-transfer would work and give him the body he wanted. But that's still a risk. Remember, he stayed in the harness, in his control center, at almost all times. He'd gotten paranoid.

Then, when he figured he had the one thing that could do the trick, the Key to Vector Sigma duplicates, it all went south. Think of it this way, if he could tag down the technorganic Maximals and their garden with the keys, he could certainly have transformed his Transmetal 2 body with it under controlled conditions.

But it all went south when Primal opened the Plasma Energy Chamber and pow, loose spark. That led to him gaining a truly mechanical body...the Diagnostic Drone. Big whoop.

He then decided it was worth the risk, he was terribly vulnerable in the Drone, and extracted/transplanted to the Optimal Optimus body.

So he kept the beast body because he couldn't render back down to his non-beast form after being Transmetallized, and because a full spark-transplant leaves him vulnerable at a very dangerous time. It's only when he got desperate and was stuck in the Drone that he took the risk.

- Coeloptera