Well, Blackout was actually killed by an F-22 air strike, and Brawl withstood a crapton of fire from both humans and Autobots.

 

While I keep seeing "They fought for thousands of years!", was there any evidence that their technology or weapons/defensive capabilities improved significantly during that time? I mean, they could have fought for a long time, but did they LEARN during that period? One would expect the strong would survive and the weak would fall, but other than winnowing the chaff of their species, did they grow?

They explained the massive jump in human technology over the last 100 years as reverse-engineered cybertronian tech, so if the cybertronians didn't improve continuously, modern weapons technology could, in fact, be far closer to cybertronian tech in a lot of respects than humans are getting credit for.

Also, since they've been fighting for long enough to literally bankrupt their planet's resources and nearly wipe themselves out as a race, who's to say they're using their most advanced technology now, as opposed to what is most feasible/available to them?

 

Jazz could have that as a special ability for all that matters.

As for human tech being great. It is, it´s just people got spoiled by the countless sci-fi movies and want those thins right now and complain that we "aren´t advanced" because we don´t have them today.

Kinetic absorption won´t save you from a Hellfire missile busting you up.

 

Josie Beller. Although her advantage above just a normal person was she was genius smart and had access to GB Blackrock's funds and technology to make her power tape costume. She was sorta like Iron Man, just with less armour.  

It may have looked like a wrench but it was a power booster rod, originally used to lift a heavy security mechanism handle in the Ark. Basically it meant a human could lift and throw large heavy stuff or just crush things. The Mechanic also had Ratchet's heat laser and cryonic freeze tools. He also seemed to be pretty smart in his own right as he was able to work out how this alien technology operated and build his own versions into cars.

They were indeed working for Zarak, although they didn't realise he was a Transformer too. Zarak gave them the technology they used to capture (only) Autobots. The plan might've continued fine if the biker guys hadn't discovered their go-betweens were Nebulan partners of Decepticon Headmaster Juniors and tried to capture those as well to score extra cash from Zarak.

Generally though any humans that injured a TF in the comics had more skills, abilities and/or technology resources at their disposal than a regular human would have access to.
Although there was that time that Skids got dazed by a human smashing his windscreen with a crowbar or tire iron or whatever it was. But then that was just silly.  

 

People love to crow about how strong human weapons are, et cetera, et cetera. There is, however, absolutely no reason why a Decepticon shouldn't be able to resist human weaponry, or perform more competently against Earth's military than what's been depicted.

Think about it: here, we have humans achieving, almost instantly, what the Autobots apparently couldn't achieve for umpteen millennia. Does that make much sense to you?

Even if they did not advance very much, I think the odds are that their military tech would still outclass ours by leaps and bounds.

This strikes me as a very lazy way of putting us on equal footing with them.

There's a rebuttal to the first post that I wrote, which you can find right there on the first page.

 

And yet you give no reason as to why the Decepticons should resist to said human weapons, other than "I think so cause I don´t want my Transformers to look bad!"

 

Well the humans have to do something about the Decepticons invading our planet! Sure the Autobots can fight them better but what about situations that requires human help?

 

The Autobots could maybe adapt? Transformers is all about change after all.

 

But what about in situations that the Autobots can't adapt to? I mean the TFP episode Scrapheap shows this well with the Scraplets only wanting to eat metal instead of flesh.

 

Okay, man, fine, here's another reason that appears to have gotten lost on you: "They can have armor capable of taking what we can dish out, the same way German Tiger tanks had armor that rendered American bazooka rounds totally impotent."

 

Fun fact. The Tiger was not invincible and it had weak points that could be penetrated by low caliber weapons. A M8 Greyhound, armed with a 37mm gun took out a Tiger in an engagement and the T-34 was also successful against it as was the Hellcat Tank Destroyer or the M10 or the Sherman Firefly, or anything with a decent gun. A better example would be the KV-1 tank from the URSS, but again it was not invincible and it could be destroyed it one knew were to take it out.

Also, Tigers tanks are one of the most overrated pieces of crap of WWII so I am not impressed. Don´t try and pull those WWII myths against me.

 

I'll give you the T-34 and the Firefly, but you have to be deluded if you regard the Greyhound incident as anything but a fluke and a freak occurrence.

 

It caught the Tiger tank from behind. The rear armor of the Tiger is comparatively weak to the front. Add in a VERY slow gun traverse and you got a big cat getting owned by a small dog.

 

There we go. Special circumstances.

By comparison, in the world of Bayformers, the humans are owning the TFs with the direct approach, special circumstances unneeded.

 

Then modern normal weapons would core straight through a Tiger´s armor at any range. You can´t really compare modern ATGMs with WWII anti tank weapons. Even modern composite armor is not a failsafe against modern missile.

Btw, Tigers got owned by 57mm caliber guns, with proper ammunition that pierced their frontal armor. And these were not under special circumstances. Like in Bayformers, they required "special rounds" but it worked. The tiger being "invincible" and requiring "uber weapons" to take it out is a myth.


"The initial Soviet response was to restart production of the 57 mm ZiS-2 anti-tank gun (production was stopped in 1941 in favour of smaller, cheaper alternatives). The ZiS-2 had better armour penetration than the 76 mm F-34 tank gun (used by most Red Army tanks, but inadequate against Tigers) - with APCR rounds, it could penetrate the Tiger's frontal armour under ideal conditions."

 

"Under ideal conditions," your quote says. Emphasis mine.

While the Tigers may not have been invincible, they at least gave as good as they got, if not better. Apart from Blackout destroying the SOCCENT base and Starscream shooting down the Raptors in TF1, this doesn't seem to have happened very much in Bayformers.

 

"Ideal conditions" don´t mean "special circumstances". It could mean a well trained gun crew, gun itself, weather, etc etc. It´s in no way a fluke like a Greyhound case, but a more common occurrence as it would suggest. And again these are WWII era weapons not modern weapons.

"As good as they got"? Meh, Tigers were probably useful as a terror weapon if nothing more.

 

You serious? They had a five to one kill ratio. Even the Allies acknowledged this.

 

And? for everything tank the Tigers killed, the Allies placed two (three maybe) more on the field. The Tiger was: a gazz guzzler, notorious hangar queen, and complex to build. It´s rivals on the other hand were sent to the battle field in thousands and were cheaper and less hard to maintain.

The kill ratios of the Tiger are pretty much worthless when the other side can literally drown you in tanks.

 

Lets take out advances from fighting longer than humans have metal weapons and you still end up with one rather large glaring problem with Transformers having armor that seems to be made out of recycled tin foil.

Transformers have to travel in space to get to Earth and space is not exactly the most friendly of places to travel.

Take an impressive weapon like the M107 with the bullet going at 2,799 feet per second it makes for a heck of an impact.

Now lets say the Transformers can do half of light speed to get from Cybertron to Earth in a fairly reasonable amount of time. That's moving at 93,141 miles per second. Hitting even a tiny particle of something in space at those speeds would have far more of a kinetic punch than a bullet. Even at a fourth of light speed that's still 2,457,681,600 feet per second hitting say a one pound chunk of iron vs the 2,799 feet per second of the M107.

If Transformers are going to travel in space at any sort of speed they would have to be able to withstand the impact of things like micrometeorites at insanely high speeds. If you can withstand micrometeorites at those speeds then things like bullets should be nothing at all.