whats your opinion on mass/size shifting?

And you know what? So far, no one has given a reasonable explanation for their opinion that mass-shifting is silly.

Or were you suggesting that, once again, we should dance around the "why should I have to explain my opinion" question?

I support it. It's alien tech. If everything were explainable, they wouldn't be aliens or technologically advanced.

• Few TFs should be able to do it.
• Mass Shifting down is good (Soundwave).
• Mass Shifting upwards is bad (Broadside).

Having a somewhat scientific bent (particle physics being something where recent experiments have offered up many new and interesting ideas when I've read about them), I'm going to weigh in here. I would've weighed in sooner if I checked this part of the forums more often.

Hmm...do you know how how old non-digital A/C temperature gauges work? I'm guessing you don't, otherwise you wouldn't necessarily need the nanobot idea (although a nanobot cellular-like structure works fine, too, but this is a less complex version). Using thermal expansion/contraction of layered metals works just fine for having a metallic robotic face moving almost exactly the way a flesh-and-blood face does.

(Not meaning to pick on you in particular Roook, that's just one of the things that regularly gets brought up and people fail to note that there is more than one scientifically-feasible way in which it could be accomplished).

Moving on to other TF tech...Teleportation, we already have some rudimentary teleportation tech. We had 100% successful teleportation of beams of light a couple of years before the turn of the millenium. Matter has proved much more difficult and will take a very long time before we get that right (85% quantum-pattern replication is NOT teleportation, no matter what the researchers want to claim).

Invisibility, we had a recent breakthrough in that one in the past month of so. Those that read about it will recognize that it puts on a realistic timetable for getting it truly working in the next few decades (30 years on the outside, but it could be as little as 10 if they make two more breakthroughs on the same scale as the recent refraction one).

And to the topic at hand - my opinion on Mass/size shifting. From a scientific point of view - absolutely 100% feasible, with technology at least 100 years in advance of our own (rough projection).

Subspace is BS, though. That fanon is truly fantasy. There are no existing phenomenon that realistically point to the possibility of something like that. Just theoretical nonsense.

How it could work is advanced particle manipulation. If you can set up a field effect to selectively remove the Higgs Boson, then everything else that is left in the targetted area would also be a type of boson. Further field manipulation to pull each type of boson together for storage then makes it simple to store the excess particles. Since bosons of the same type may occupy the same physical space, all bosons of each individual type can be funneled into a containment device that could even be microscopic in size. I don't know how many individual containment devices are needed since I can't recall how many known types of bosons there are off the top of my head (and there is the possibility that there are others that we are currently unaware of). The greatest difficulty with the technology is, of course, correctly re-integrating all the contained bosons into their correct configuration in the original pattern. That would be a very advanced field effect manipulation problem.

So, basically, when I was younger and more ignorant I had some problems with mass/size shifting. Now that I'm more educated, I have no problems with it at all. In fact, I find the lack of use of it in the recent movies to be as ignorant as the Director's reasoning for the junk-pile appearance of the TFs. The appearance of the movie-TFs is a topic for another discussion, however.

Originally Posted by fosterlager Omnus, thank you. You've just blinded me with science.

Omnus, thank you. You've just blinded me with science.

Heh, you're welcome. Next time I'll try to adjust the glare filters properly, though.

Originally Posted by fosterlager Omnus, thank you. You've just blinded me with science.

Absolutely not. You've been given reasonable explanations. It's not our fault that you can't get your head around them.

As I said, mass-shifting is discordant. It stands out because the technology requires too much of a suspension of disbelief. The fact that there is even a thread devoted to this is evidence enough that mass-shifting stands out in the fandom as one of the contentious issues.

Further supporting my reasonable explanation, I already pointed out that "subspace" is for me, just as tedious as mass-shifting... if not more.

I also don't know why you keep including "AI" in your critiques as an "implausible" technology. There is no AI in Transformers. TF's are alive, and self-aware, the same way the gooey mass of hormones, chemicals and electric impulses between our ears makes US alive and self-aware. We are machines. They are machines. Only the base materials are different.

You can hold up Omnus' contribution to the debate as scientific vindication of "mass-shifting", but that doesn't change the fact that whether or not mass-shifting is plausible, in the public mindset, we still have issues with it... particularly when applied to technological science fiction as opposed to cosmic fantasy. We take little issue with the Enterprise on Star Trek using Transporter Beams and Replicators on a daily basis... but if Jean-Luc Picard said "Mr. Laforge... the Romulans are almost upon us... use the mass-shifters to make us the size of a sandwich to hide in that asteroid" a lot of us would roll our eyes. It's just a matter of what "works" in our imagining of how the universe operates... and what stands out like a sore thumb.

Hence, those who say "Mass shifting is cool. Except in the new Bay movie... it would have been stupid there" are actually admitting that "realistically" they can't easily accept mass-shifting .

Exactly... I think these 3 points are important elements towards making the notion of mass-shifting more acceptable... though I think your above statement about "advanced aliens" is totally bogus.

Technological evolution is not a universal straight line... there's no reason why alien tech would have to be indecipherable to us in order to be "advanced". It's entirely plausible that TFs might be very advanced in some areas, but relatively basic in others.

zmog

I'm not too fond of mass-shifting. It seems a bit too 'out-there', and I wish the focus was on the fact that they are robots and their parts shift around, not that they can somehow magically shrink or grow.

On the other hand, you can't do Soundwave justice without mass shifting.

I don't have any "excuse" for it, but when I first saw the show in '84 the mass shifting (or growing & shrinking - to use the terms that would have been available to me at the time) bothered me.

Living alien robots - not an issue. Living alien robots that change size however was, apparently, too much for my poor 11 year old brain.

Rational - no. Scientific - no. But the issue was decided then and there. What makes it worse? Bumblebee's size changes bothered me more than Megatron or Soundwave.

So, my opinion, such that it is, would be against. That's probably why I've always preferred the G2 tank Megatron over the original

I don't mind it al all .... With my Vivid imagination it has never phased me .

No just because I'd rather have a big robot turning into a big vehicle and a small bot turning into a small vehicle, not I AM TAPE DECK, I AM THE SIZE OF MEGATROOOON! or LOOK AT ME I'M A JEEP THAT TURNS INTO A GOD-SIZE LEG!