Are Transformers immortals? Options

[Zodberg]

They lives to be crillion year old.

They are crilliontarians.

[TheTurnipKing]

There's also the detail that "parts breaking down" isn't just physical decay; anything that carries a charge (perhaps even laser cores) will eventually lose its capacitance.

Personally, I also like to throw in generational technology. I like the idea that Transformer tech is not stagnant (it just seems that way because the War has destroyed any infrastructure or knowledge-base needed for widespread tech advancements --guys like Wheeljack and Perceptor should be tenured professors at the Crystal City Academy of Sciences, but they're too busy trying to stay alive, and the CCAS is in ruins). There might be a point where upgrades just aren't supported anymore. Avoiding obsolescence becomes a matter of improvising patches and quick-fixes (and having access to the best doctors that energon can buy). For that matter, at this point, the Transformers are way off-manual; they're tech improvising their own upgrades.

(Tangent 1; maybe that's a motive behind Optimus' hand-picked crew; to assemble and protect Cybertron's best and brightest, to keep Cybertron's cultural heritage from flickering out. He really is a Librarian. Alpha Trion would be proud.)

(Tangent 2; when Prime Ratchet says that some things can't be manufactured, I start to consider the Prime universe as an alt-verse where Optimus didn't succeed in this. Perhaps, in another universe, a different Ratchet [having the benefit of Cerebros, and Perceptor, and Signal Flare, a non-hardass Wheeljack, and a functional Iacon database] would be able to build a T-cog from Earth technology. Prime Ratchet would probably consider this either a miracle on par with turning water into energon, or an act of dangerous hubris, but to G1 Ratchet, it'd be just modern medical technology.)

It's generally implied that earth materials circa 1984 are a bit shoddy for Transformers purposes in most G1 stories. By 2006, several decades of exposure to Transformers technology means we're a bit more geared up for supplying Transformers.

There's also the detail that "parts breaking down" isn't just physical decay; anything that carries a charge (perhaps even laser cores) will eventually lose its capacitance.

The laser core is media. On it is written the Transformers history, etched with the very spark energy of Primus. Once the spark is expired, the laser core is returned to Primus for download and integration into his psyche.

It's basically Primus's very sneaky way of getting around being shut down. He might be deactivated, but his drones are still out gathering information and knowledge.

This post has been edited by TheTurnipKing: Jun 20 2012, 04:02 AM