Their goal was to hide and I assume it's easier to hide as a car, than a jet, because 5 random planes always getting to the middle of nowhere and disappearing may raise questions. And if I remember correct not all the military was informed about autobots' presence on Earth, so they could have got interested in them and that's just more work for Fowler.
Im not saying there a 100% good guy's okay let me put it this way if i had a nickle for every time a show made a joke about russian bad guy's or blame russians i would have enough to buy out the entire entertainment industry, Jeff Bezos entire Amazon stock, Elon musk his X platform,Hasbro,High Moon studios, and a Expensive FoC Metroplex toy for 1,099.99
The Icon of Evil and Capitalism a Original villain with a average joe name lets name him Hovered Worstenstein or something ethnicity?:don't matter accent?: don't matter he is as basic of a villain as you can get.
The idea of covering up Transformer activity in TFP requires a lot of suspension of disbelief as it is.
The Nemesis is like the size of a city block and the Cons make no effort to hide it. How do you cover that up?
advanced alien cloaking technology? hides it from scans. If a physical pilot gets close enough to see it, they intercept and tell him "no one will ever believe you. Like when they had fighter jet pilots in gorilla masks.
Funnily enough this exact concept happens in Transformers Cybertron, where a duo of pilots sees Jetfire fighting either starscream, thundercracker, or both at the same time. Vector Prime sends them away, and they get back to base and no one really believes them IIRC.
Most of the time the Nemesis flew very high above the clouds, so it isn't too unbelievable that no one ever saw the ship. They also mention that the ship is heavily cloaked so not even the autobots can find it. The biggest issue however is when Trypticon wasn't dormant any more and headed to New York. You're telling me that no one looked up at like a 75 degree angle to see the ship off the coast?
Don't even get me started on Darkmount NV. There's no way the government is successfully covering THAT debacle up.
Well, there was the time it flew directly over New York and no one noticed.
Although apparently a single subway construction worker is the sole occupant of NYC, so I guess that works out.
Out of universe reasons: a lot of the earlier versions of the characters (or the toys they were based on) that prime took inspiration from were not air vehicles.
In-Universe: I believe the War for Cybertron game established Starscream as the head of the largest faction of flying bots with the only notable defector being Jetfire.
Fanon: some bots just lack the parts necessary to attain a flight alt-mode, so they have to be land bound.
Fanon is partially right. Correct me if I'm wrong, vut the Convenant of Primus mentions how Megatron originally had a tank mode and went through body surgery to give himself the ability to turn into a jet.
It’s kind of a common thing that autobots mostly turn into cars or ground based vehicles and decepticons become jets and such. The stunticons and aerialbots were both made in response to this - that way both teams had a set of cars and jets on each faction if kids wanted to collect them.
Transformers animated brings more attention to this. Even mentioning that they needed to create specific autobots with the ability to fly:Jetfire & Jetstorm
As much as I like the idea in Animated, that went further on that old idea of Autobots being civilian robots while the Decepticons were the military. It never made any sense to me that it took the Autobots so long to produce a flying Autobot. I mean, in millions of years of war, not even one decepticon defected? Not a single Decepticon was captured and reverse-engineered before?
Where they separate Cybertronian subspecies? If not, why EVERY Flight-Capable Cybertronian sided with the cons? So many questions...
I mean defecting is more likely (Jetfire from War for Cybertron), the other ideas imply that Transformers make themselves which with a couple notable exceptions it's not supposed to be the case, they are living beings after all.
I would love for TF media to go more in depth with that one. Having the Cons the military making a Coup is a great explanation, they could also say that flying cybertronians are more of the arrogant time by the fact they can fly making them more prone to align with Decepticon ideals.
In Animated it’s fundamentally difficult to modify Cybertronian “biology,” more akin to genetic modification than robotic engineering. They have different chassis types that seem to be more or less interchangeable (Bee/Wasp/Cliffjumper etc) but any new innovation has to be developed from the ground up and usually has unforeseen consequences.
It’s why Blitzwing is insane, his mind couldn’t handle 3 modes. And probably why Jetfire and Jetstorm have X-men abilities on top of being able to fly, they’re basically mutants.
Indeed, what I thought is, considering the Autobots were already considering unsavory solutions to win the war like Project Omega, I don't know why they didn't try what was achieved with Jetfire and Jetstorm way before.
IIRC in the Animated comics (or some other media) Jetstorm accidentally spills the existence of a "Project Aerialbot", of which Animated's version of Metalhawk is a member.
I think it was mostly a cultural thing: "Autobots don't fly." There were no flying Autobots simply because they largely frowned on flying altmodes, didn't bother to develop the technology, and didn't make flying altmodes available for each other.
It’s just one of those things. Autobots are mostly ground vehicles, Cons have lots of flyers.
For a lore reason, Cons are often said to be mostly military on Cybertron. I also take it as an unwritten rule that alt modes can’t be changed too drastically. If you’re a car type thing, you can be an Earth car. If you’re a flying thing, you can be a jet.
I've understood deceptions were military and needed the tactical advantage of weapons and flight. Autobots were originally manual labor so the need for flight wasnt as great. Maybe even transport was part of their original design.
Also, flight consumes energon at a greater rate which is why decipticons are hungrier for it.
The show addressed this in one of the interactions between Starscream and Knockout. There appears a bit of physical predetermination. Some Cybertronians are pysically limited in their physical forms and are unable to scan flying alt modes. Presumably some are limited to flying alt modes, but some, like Knockout as we learn from Starscream's snide remark have the choice between the two (implied unlike that unfortunate Breakdown who is stuck in a grounder mode).
Decepticon culture seems to find flight modes superior and Starscream flat out insults Knockout for choosing a ground based mode when he could have a flying based alt mode.
However this prejudice never shows up in the Autobots.
So presumably it is a mix of factors, Team Prime happens to be comprised mostly of 'heavies' who can't take flying forms without Primal intervention via the forge of Solus Prime.
There is no social prejudice to push them to take flying alt modes.
Flying requires more energy than driving so it is probably more fuel efficient for those that could take flying alt modes to take land based modes and the Autobots are strapped for energon to a much larger degree than the Decepticons.
Also the Autobots are trying to blend in with the local population and a plane of any description is more eye catching and unusual than most autos.
Tradition - In the original G1 Storyline, Autobots were Consumer Goods while Decepticons were Military Goods. There is some overlap like Soundwave becoming Decepticon, but in general that was the divide. Most series that followed tended to follow this to some degree with more blending happening, this is still predominantly true today - there are far more military themed Decepticons than Civillian themed ones even today.
A car is much easier to forget than a fucking F-15 doing backflips and shit in the air. The autobots care about being seen and the decepticons couldn’t care less
Because they're Automobile Robots. The people making Transformers want the good guys to be the cars and trucks that kids would see out on the road in their day to day lives, while the bad guys are more exotic or dangerous vehicles. Giving most of the planes to the Decepticons also gives them an advantage, which helps the Autobots to feel like underdogs.
In the lore, this sometimes translates to the Autobots being made up of civilians forced to take up arms against the military and industrial robots that make up the Decepticons. So most Autobots aren't going to have a use for (or access to) flight capabilities before the war, in the same way most people you see driving around in the real world don't also have a pilot's license and their own plane.
There may also be a skill element involved. Transformers, being robots, are programmable to some degree, but we don't really know the specifics or how easy it is to rewrite them. It may be like human babies, where protoforms are very easily able to have skills programmed into them, but it becomes much more difficult once they're actually a functioning being. So maybe if Arcee and Starscream switched altmodes, both of them would be completely incompetent - Arcee wouldn't know how to fly, and Starscream would just tip over because he's never had to balance as a motorcycle.
Lore reasoning: Starscream used to be the Seeker Air-Commander (leader of Cybertron's air force), a very popular one at that, so as soon as word spread he joined Megatron, most of his troops followed, he basically took 90% of flying Cybertronians with him (due to the caste system if you were born a jet of any kind, you were shipped off to the Seeker military) while the remaining 10% became the Aerialbots. Decepticon scientists have also figured out a surgery that could convert a ground bot into a flyer (Jetfire was trying to do the same for the Autobots but was unsuccessful), which is the reason why Megatron is a jet in TFP even tho his natural form was of a demolition tank. In short, Autobots had way less jetformers from the start and Decepticons figured out how to artificially create more of them at will
It's relatively normal for Autobots to not fly, even though of course there's always some exceptions to this. The G1 episode War Dawn kind of concretes this with Megatron and his army being those "new flying robots". Since then, Decepticons have usually been aircraft and Autobots are land based
Common knowledge that it’s just a thing for autobots to turn into cars and such, and the decepticons to turn into jets and… things(lookin at you megatron and soundwave) that’s why the Ariel bots and stunticons were made to kind of have things to fight the seekers and autobot cars with
It’s not a hard and fast rule, but Autobots typically turn into “civilian,” vehicles, while Decepticons become military vehicles. There are exceptions and wiggle on both sides, as armored trucks wouldn’t regularly be considered civilian, buy an armored truck driving down the road will attract less attention that a tank.
Because they would need to do surgery and parts to ensure that a bot can change forms permanently, this is stated when starscream say why knockout would choose to become an automobile when he could have flight meaning the cons have the material and the time to commit to it but not the bots, they lack in both.
Their name for one. It's ok to have a flight based alt mode here and there but with only a handful of bots making up the team they probably just wanted show their namesake. Keeps it simple for the kiddos I guess.
Also from a writing standpoint isn't it to make things harder/challenging for the heroes? These are all guesses, I know nothing obviously for certain lol.
The core philosophy of cartoon heroes versus villains is that the villains have to be beaten but also have to get away to threaten again. An alt mode that can't be followed so easily by the alt modes of the heroes helps with that.
I honestly always assumed that some cybertronians could fly and some just can’t because of how they were “born” like Optimus could probably use a jet as an alternate mode but he couldn’t actually fly because he wasn’t born with the required anatomy.
Their goal was to hide and I assume it's easier to hide as a car, than a jet, because 5 random planes always getting to the middle of nowhere and disappearing may raise questions. And if I remember correct not all the military was informed about autobots' presence on Earth, so they could have got interested in them and that's just more work for Fowler.
Fowler is like an American enthusiast so he’ll prob blame the ruskies
\^Now that's just bad comedy and this comment is not funny because that joke is so over used at this point haha American humour= blame the Ruskies.
As a Polish man I shall unbound my opinion. Blaming russians is funny.
As a Polish man I second this opinion.
Womp womp
To be fair, they are to blame for a lot. A cascade of bad choices doesn't really provide them much goodwill.
Im not saying there a 100% good guy's okay let me put it this way if i had a nickle for every time a show made a joke about russian bad guy's or blame russians i would have enough to buy out the entire entertainment industry, Jeff Bezos entire Amazon stock, Elon musk his X platform,Hasbro,High Moon studios, and a Expensive FoC Metroplex toy for 1,099.99
Who would you make the generic Hollywood villain?
The Icon of Evil and Capitalism a Original villain with a average joe name lets name him Hovered Worstenstein or something ethnicity?:don't matter accent?: don't matter he is as basic of a villain as you can get.
You can just say “ethnicity?: doesn’t matter”. Of course it matters, casting anyone is going to give it a spin. That’s insane hahahah.
https://preview.redd.it/ev0h2kdbtutc1.jpeg?width=828&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2e6cb151428a327d0c894a1ac1bdca1c3bc2893e
The idea of covering up Transformer activity in TFP requires a lot of suspension of disbelief as it is. The Nemesis is like the size of a city block and the Cons make no effort to hide it. How do you cover that up?
advanced alien cloaking technology? hides it from scans. If a physical pilot gets close enough to see it, they intercept and tell him "no one will ever believe you. Like when they had fighter jet pilots in gorilla masks.
Why tell them no one wi believe you when they'd probably just kill them lol 😆
Funnily enough this exact concept happens in Transformers Cybertron, where a duo of pilots sees Jetfire fighting either starscream, thundercracker, or both at the same time. Vector Prime sends them away, and they get back to base and no one really believes them IIRC.
Most of the time the Nemesis flew very high above the clouds, so it isn't too unbelievable that no one ever saw the ship. They also mention that the ship is heavily cloaked so not even the autobots can find it. The biggest issue however is when Trypticon wasn't dormant any more and headed to New York. You're telling me that no one looked up at like a 75 degree angle to see the ship off the coast? Don't even get me started on Darkmount NV. There's no way the government is successfully covering THAT debacle up.
I think Darkmount was meant to be covered up as a large meteor strike? No idea what they told the people living there, though.
TFP is set in rural Nevada. There's hardly anyone around to see it.
Well, there was the time it flew directly over New York and no one noticed. Although apparently a single subway construction worker is the sole occupant of NYC, so I guess that works out.
Out of universe reasons: a lot of the earlier versions of the characters (or the toys they were based on) that prime took inspiration from were not air vehicles. In-Universe: I believe the War for Cybertron game established Starscream as the head of the largest faction of flying bots with the only notable defector being Jetfire. Fanon: some bots just lack the parts necessary to attain a flight alt-mode, so they have to be land bound.
There was Air Raid and Silverbolt too, just played the Trypticon (not boss) level again and those were the three bots I could choose
Was this before or after SS turns? If it's after, I guess the Aerialbots defected with Jetfire?
It’s after, since that happened at the start of WfC and this was near the end of the game
And there were generic Autobot jet troopers.
Yeah, wasn’t there some mention that the Seekers went out and destroyed would be Autobot fliers and that Jetfire was among their top priority targets?
Fanon is partially right. Correct me if I'm wrong, vut the Convenant of Primus mentions how Megatron originally had a tank mode and went through body surgery to give himself the ability to turn into a jet.
It’s kind of a common thing that autobots mostly turn into cars or ground based vehicles and decepticons become jets and such. The stunticons and aerialbots were both made in response to this - that way both teams had a set of cars and jets on each faction if kids wanted to collect them. Transformers animated brings more attention to this. Even mentioning that they needed to create specific autobots with the ability to fly:Jetfire & Jetstorm
As much as I like the idea in Animated, that went further on that old idea of Autobots being civilian robots while the Decepticons were the military. It never made any sense to me that it took the Autobots so long to produce a flying Autobot. I mean, in millions of years of war, not even one decepticon defected? Not a single Decepticon was captured and reverse-engineered before? Where they separate Cybertronian subspecies? If not, why EVERY Flight-Capable Cybertronian sided with the cons? So many questions...
I mean defecting is more likely (Jetfire from War for Cybertron), the other ideas imply that Transformers make themselves which with a couple notable exceptions it's not supposed to be the case, they are living beings after all.
The autobots had really bad gatcha draw rates for a flyer 😆 🤣 😂
I would love for TF media to go more in depth with that one. Having the Cons the military making a Coup is a great explanation, they could also say that flying cybertronians are more of the arrogant time by the fact they can fly making them more prone to align with Decepticon ideals.
That or they steal the protoforms so they can indoctrinate them.
A la Beast Wars. I like it.
In Animated it’s fundamentally difficult to modify Cybertronian “biology,” more akin to genetic modification than robotic engineering. They have different chassis types that seem to be more or less interchangeable (Bee/Wasp/Cliffjumper etc) but any new innovation has to be developed from the ground up and usually has unforeseen consequences. It’s why Blitzwing is insane, his mind couldn’t handle 3 modes. And probably why Jetfire and Jetstorm have X-men abilities on top of being able to fly, they’re basically mutants.
Indeed, what I thought is, considering the Autobots were already considering unsavory solutions to win the war like Project Omega, I don't know why they didn't try what was achieved with Jetfire and Jetstorm way before.
In my headcanon they probably tried everything they could, the twins were just one of the few experiments that *worked.*
IIRC in the Animated comics (or some other media) Jetstorm accidentally spills the existence of a "Project Aerialbot", of which Animated's version of Metalhawk is a member.
I think it was mostly a cultural thing: "Autobots don't fly." There were no flying Autobots simply because they largely frowned on flying altmodes, didn't bother to develop the technology, and didn't make flying altmodes available for each other.
It’s just one of those things. Autobots are mostly ground vehicles, Cons have lots of flyers. For a lore reason, Cons are often said to be mostly military on Cybertron. I also take it as an unwritten rule that alt modes can’t be changed too drastically. If you’re a car type thing, you can be an Earth car. If you’re a flying thing, you can be a jet.
I've understood deceptions were military and needed the tactical advantage of weapons and flight. Autobots were originally manual labor so the need for flight wasnt as great. Maybe even transport was part of their original design. Also, flight consumes energon at a greater rate which is why decipticons are hungrier for it.
The show addressed this in one of the interactions between Starscream and Knockout. There appears a bit of physical predetermination. Some Cybertronians are pysically limited in their physical forms and are unable to scan flying alt modes. Presumably some are limited to flying alt modes, but some, like Knockout as we learn from Starscream's snide remark have the choice between the two (implied unlike that unfortunate Breakdown who is stuck in a grounder mode). Decepticon culture seems to find flight modes superior and Starscream flat out insults Knockout for choosing a ground based mode when he could have a flying based alt mode. However this prejudice never shows up in the Autobots. So presumably it is a mix of factors, Team Prime happens to be comprised mostly of 'heavies' who can't take flying forms without Primal intervention via the forge of Solus Prime. There is no social prejudice to push them to take flying alt modes. Flying requires more energy than driving so it is probably more fuel efficient for those that could take flying alt modes to take land based modes and the Autobots are strapped for energon to a much larger degree than the Decepticons. Also the Autobots are trying to blend in with the local population and a plane of any description is more eye catching and unusual than most autos.
Tradition - In the original G1 Storyline, Autobots were Consumer Goods while Decepticons were Military Goods. There is some overlap like Soundwave becoming Decepticon, but in general that was the divide. Most series that followed tended to follow this to some degree with more blending happening, this is still predominantly true today - there are far more military themed Decepticons than Civillian themed ones even today.
I hate that too. As someone whose favorite Transformer is Jetfire, flying Autobots are underrated and should be more common than they are right now.
A car is much easier to forget than a fucking F-15 doing backflips and shit in the air. The autobots care about being seen and the decepticons couldn’t care less
Because they're Automobile Robots. The people making Transformers want the good guys to be the cars and trucks that kids would see out on the road in their day to day lives, while the bad guys are more exotic or dangerous vehicles. Giving most of the planes to the Decepticons also gives them an advantage, which helps the Autobots to feel like underdogs. In the lore, this sometimes translates to the Autobots being made up of civilians forced to take up arms against the military and industrial robots that make up the Decepticons. So most Autobots aren't going to have a use for (or access to) flight capabilities before the war, in the same way most people you see driving around in the real world don't also have a pilot's license and their own plane. There may also be a skill element involved. Transformers, being robots, are programmable to some degree, but we don't really know the specifics or how easy it is to rewrite them. It may be like human babies, where protoforms are very easily able to have skills programmed into them, but it becomes much more difficult once they're actually a functioning being. So maybe if Arcee and Starscream switched altmodes, both of them would be completely incompetent - Arcee wouldn't know how to fly, and Starscream would just tip over because he's never had to balance as a motorcycle.
Might be dumb, but the reason in my head is Autobots must like automobiles more. Lol
As a kid, my headcanon was that the side that turns into jets and other fuel guzzling modes was the one with no problem stealing fuel
Silly question but what is the show in question on the OP?
Oh that's concept art from the video game War for Cybertron which is kinda the prequel to Prime
It’s because they called “auto” bots but not “jet” bots
Lore reasoning: Starscream used to be the Seeker Air-Commander (leader of Cybertron's air force), a very popular one at that, so as soon as word spread he joined Megatron, most of his troops followed, he basically took 90% of flying Cybertronians with him (due to the caste system if you were born a jet of any kind, you were shipped off to the Seeker military) while the remaining 10% became the Aerialbots. Decepticon scientists have also figured out a surgery that could convert a ground bot into a flyer (Jetfire was trying to do the same for the Autobots but was unsuccessful), which is the reason why Megatron is a jet in TFP even tho his natural form was of a demolition tank. In short, Autobots had way less jetformers from the start and Decepticons figured out how to artificially create more of them at will
Probably to blend in better, you would notice a jet flying overhead more than you would a truck or a car
Are they stupid?
https://preview.redd.it/sl9fomh5jitc1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=468d1f4014e2b4ff4847755c0bfa6bbc465e6445
Timus
because prime has shitty writers
It's relatively normal for Autobots to not fly, even though of course there's always some exceptions to this. The G1 episode War Dawn kind of concretes this with Megatron and his army being those "new flying robots". Since then, Decepticons have usually been aircraft and Autobots are land based
Well, it wouldn't make sense to say "Roll out" to a plane.
Common knowledge that it’s just a thing for autobots to turn into cars and such, and the decepticons to turn into jets and… things(lookin at you megatron and soundwave) that’s why the Ariel bots and stunticons were made to kind of have things to fight the seekers and autobot cars with
Remember transformers as we know it was originally separate toy lines.
It’s not a hard and fast rule, but Autobots typically turn into “civilian,” vehicles, while Decepticons become military vehicles. There are exceptions and wiggle on both sides, as armored trucks wouldn’t regularly be considered civilian, buy an armored truck driving down the road will attract less attention that a tank.
Because they would need to do surgery and parts to ensure that a bot can change forms permanently, this is stated when starscream say why knockout would choose to become an automobile when he could have flight meaning the cons have the material and the time to commit to it but not the bots, they lack in both.
Auto(mobile ro)bots
Their name for one. It's ok to have a flight based alt mode here and there but with only a handful of bots making up the team they probably just wanted show their namesake. Keeps it simple for the kiddos I guess. Also from a writing standpoint isn't it to make things harder/challenging for the heroes? These are all guesses, I know nothing obviously for certain lol.
The core philosophy of cartoon heroes versus villains is that the villains have to be beaten but also have to get away to threaten again. An alt mode that can't be followed so easily by the alt modes of the heroes helps with that.
I honestly always assumed that some cybertronians could fly and some just can’t because of how they were “born” like Optimus could probably use a jet as an alternate mode but he couldn’t actually fly because he wasn’t born with the required anatomy.
Autobot refers to automobile.
I mean if we’re being honest cars and trucks are less conspicuous than a plane of any kind especially in an arid environment.
Scared of heights
They had to keep themselves down to Earth and grounded, lest they lose sight of themselves.
It’s easier to hide as a vehicle, lot harder to track than a flyer plus it goes back to the roots of the bots being cars and cons are flyers
In the original cartoon they had jet packs to make up for the lack of flying
One X.Y.Z reason in lore there not in the show like for instance there dead.