When Did One Continuity 'Drop The Ball' While Another One 'Caught' It?

[roller]

i think the G2 ads and Cybernet space cube had better 3d animation then Beast warseers

[Geminii]

It was probably a single-density diskette too!

Are we assuming that Chip Chase, a genius technohead with regular access to alien computers and the gregarious aliens in charge of same, never had any upgrades made to his personal home workstation?

With current cutting-edge lab tech, we should be able to squeeze about 100 terabits into a volume the size and shape of a 5.25-inch floppy dish. That might be enough to encode a compressed version of Prime - and that's assuming that Cybertronian tech was only 25 years ahead of 1980s-era humanity.

Another assumption, one I like a little better, is that the floppy disk didn't contain Prime himself - it contained a three-megabit key sequence which would unlock an access channel to the Allspark via the Matrix and find/retrieve Prime's actual pattern. Or it encoded precise time-space co-ordinates for a read-only timescoop to find/copy an older version of Prime's laser core, plus a fractal sequence which would act on the timescooped data to create a rough outline of events from the timescooped point to the moment of disk encoding.

In other words, anything can be technobabbled away.

[Sky Shadow]

Are we assuming that Chip Chase, a genius technohead with regular access to alien computers and the gregarious aliens in charge of same, never had any upgrades made to his personal home workstation?

Umm... weren't we talking about Ethan Zachary, who had no personal interaction with 'aliens' prior to the day he independently put Prime on a floppy disk?

That said, Zachary was a computer genius with a cutting-edge lab... which he used to play computer games. And your technobabble sounds sufficiently babbly to be convincing (although there were no Allsparks or laser cores in G1 comic continuity.)

[kup]

Umm... weren't we talking about Ethan Zachary, who had no personal interaction with 'aliens' prior to the day he independently put Prime on a floppy disk?

That said, Zachary was a computer genius with a cutting-edge lab... which he used to play computer games. And your technobabble sounds sufficiently babbly to be convincing (although there were no Allsparks or laser cores in G1 comic continuity.)

I think that the term 'Spark core' was mentioned as something necessary for Transformer life but it was just passing lines as in "I felt it all the way to my Spark core". That was never elaborated upon until Beast Wars.

[roller]

laser cores yo

[Sky Shadow]

I think that the term 'Spark core' was mentioned as something necessary for Transformer life but it was just passing lines as in "I felt it all the way to my Spark core".

The closest thing I can think of to what you're saying is from issue #1 of the 1986 movie adaptation where Optimus Prime says "Not while a spark still lights up my circuits, Megatron!" And in the Pretenders issue I originally alluded to for this thread, Prime says "for as long as a spark exists within a single mechabot, good shall always vanquish evil." But in both these cases he's clearly talking about a literal spark like one from a sparkplug, not anything to do with the ones in Beast Wars ot the Allspark that wouldn't be invented until Beast Machines.

[GoktimusPrime]

In the G1 comics the Transformers had a "life essence" also known as "primal essence" - spawned from the life essence of Primus himself. The Creation Matrix was forged from Primus' life essence itself. That's the Furman retcon anyway - before then Budiansky had described the Matrix as a highly sophisticated computer program capable to producing life engrams for other Transformers. That's why Shockwave nicked Prime's head so he could use the Creation Matrix program to create the Constructicons. Optimus Prime then uploaded the Creation Matrix to the brain of Buster Witwicky - and later on when the Matrix was retrieved they used it to give life to Jetfire. But that's all been officially retconned as per Furman's definition of the Creation Matrix and Transformer life essences. The words "laser core" or "spark" were never used in the context of a "soul" in the comics, but they did have other equivalent terms (e.g.: essence). In the Beast Wars comic (Reaching The Omega Point) Unicron's soul is referred to as "Dark Essence" - whereas in the animation (JP) and IDW comics it's called Angolmois.

Having said that, G1 was always fairly ambiguous about TF souls - Beast Wars was the first to very concretely define and describe the nature of the Transformers' soul, and as such their term for it (Sparks) has entered common currency for TF souls ever since. The concept of the AllSpark was mentioned in Beast Wars but became clearly defined and specifically named in Beast Machines. The AllSpark in the movie and Animated is a different concept from the AllSpark in the G1-G2-BW-BM continuity family though. In the G1 continuity family the AllSpark is more like the Transformers' equivalent of Nirvana. In the movie and Animated it's a Deus ex machina. Mmm... Cosmic MacGuffin fresh...

[Paulbot]

That said, Zachary was a computer genius with a cutting-edge lab... which he used to play computer games. And your technobabble sounds sufficiently babbly to be convincing (although there were no Allsparks or laser cores in G1 comic continuity.)

Which is why I wrote (well drafted) a little essay called "Powermaster Optimus Prime has no soul" back around 2000/2001

[GoktimusPrime]

He's an abomination in the eyes of Primus.

[Geminii]

What, he couldn't substitute Hi-Q?