Exactly how did Megatron break free of the Maximal ship, land on cyberton before Optimus got back, engineered a virus that took control of every single cybertronian, including the Tripredacus Council and Maximal elders, and turn them into vehicons all by himself? Forgive me if this answer is in a comic somewhere...
Yeah it's in a comic. Dont know who it was, but sometime after Megatron escape. He took the virus from another Predacon. I'm guessing he first gave himself a cure and then release the virus. He probably made deals with Predacons and started the early Vehicons. Then he didnt keep his word and his Predacon helpers lost their sparks too. Nothing offical but that atleast makes a better starting point. Then with a bigger army he takes over the entire planet hunting down the remaining Maximals or Predacons. Now how long it was between that time and when Primal and his crew show up, not really sure. I dont know if he got the Tripredacus Council. There was a reason why they were on a space station. They probably wouldnt trust Megatron enough to show up on Cybertron. Dont know if Megatron had space drones in any comics though.
What I didn't understand was how did Megatron falling off the shuttle or whatever mean he got back there first? Unless, like Waspinator, that means that he was stuck way back in time and had to find his own way home.
I never got that either. I always guess he could had been picked up by another ship while he was stuck in space. Then he killed the crew and makes his way to Cybertron.
The transwarp was sending them into the future, by falling off the ship and out of transwarp, he arrived in Cybertron's not-so-distant past. He still travelled into the future, just not as far. I just assumed Waspinator took four million years to get to Cybertron.
In the time stream back to Cybertron, Megatron broke free, and got back time-wise sometime before the Maximals were going to arrive. Then he did the virus and the Vehicon invasion, and about the most uneccesary, worst and stupidest character change in Transformers history.
Think about it this way. If you were on a plane leaving NYC and headed twards Cuba and you jumped off the plane early you might land somewhere in Miami.[dont qoute me on an exact route] So its the same for Megatron. He was tied to a ship traveling trew time to the era they came from. He jumps ship early re-entering normal time years before the Maximals did.
The BotCon comics explain that once he returned to Cybertron, he went to meet up with his old mentor, Cryotek, who was fascinated by his beast mode and offered to purge it from Megatron, with the intent of taking it for his own. The process put Cryotek out for a while, during which time Megatron stole the virus from his labs and launched his takeover using it.
It's not so much the when that bothers me as the where. And then how did he get home? Did he just fly home? Shouldn't he have been stranded in space somewhere? Would flying home take "less" time than the rest of the Maximal's trip? How did they even get home, since the Transwarp drive was supposed new, and the Ark shuttle ancient to them? Did they just yank it out of the Axalon and put it in the shuttle?
By all appearances, he basically just fell out of the timestream onto Cybertron. That's how the IDW "Ascending" comic shows it (even though it's a different continuity to the BotCon comics). Transwarp is kind of a funny thing. But yeah, the Transwarp drive was basically yanked out of the Axalon, or perhaps recovered quickly by Prime from the Nemesis before he escaped it as it went down, and hooked up to the Autobot shuttle. The device Rhinox is seen operating at the conclusion of "Nemesis, Part 2" is Maximal-scaled and visibly jury-rigged, not an existing part of the shuttle.
Even if he was stranded in space....he most likely had years to get back to Cybertron.And maybe he did fly home. But I dont see any reason to believe he would have been stranded in space or if he had it would be far from home. I'm assuming that Rinox retro-fited the Autobot Shuttle with trans warp capacities.
As BW on Earth was set roughly 1 million years in the past, and BW/BM-era Cybertron is somewhere around 300 years in the future, there's plenty of leeway for traveling between the two times for a lot of work to be done. (though the BW comic shows Megatron showing up on Cybertron around the end of events there, with Cybertron in a messed-up and weakened state). If he dropped out of Transwarp a mere 1000 years or so short of the final destination, there's still lots of time to make way to Cybertron, devise and implement takeover plans, maybe even fail a few times before Primal's crew gets home. Most media sources appear to show Megs returning to Cybertron sometime after he originally left, so that probably cuts it down to a few years. (the takeover part, not the getting to Cybertron part)
The Transwarp drive had a Predacon symbol on it, leading me to believe that it was that bit of machinery that Primal tore off the Nemesis' control panel (where it was likely installed by Tarantulas). I think everyone has already explained Megatron's arrival, and yeah, over the course of 4 million years, Waspinator flew back to Cybertron under his own power. Come to think of it, there's a period of time I want to see more done with: the millions of years of adventures had by Waspinator as he travelled back to Cybertron.
Yeah, either that or hundreds of years of Megatron manipulating things in the background of Cybertron to set up not only his eventual conquest, but his original departure, ignorant of his own future presence. What I meant with the "stranded" comment was because I can't remember if he had rocket boosters or whatever in his TM2, so I'm trying to think of how he would actually propel himself through space. Maybe dropping out of transwarp left him with some momentum, pointed directly towards Cybertron, or maybe he used his dragon-head to propel himself Galvatron-style. Of course, given McFeely's post, the entire contents of this post are null and void in the "Ascending" universe.
Had its final chapters been published, the BotCon story "Primeval Dawn" would have revealed that Waspinator got to Cybertron by following Primal Prime and the other Wreckers-to-be through a Transwarp portal.
Nifty! So he just hung around on Earth, hiding from the angry natives after they rejected him, until a chance to escape presented itself? That works.
