Kem's Robot Worldbuilding Yellhole Apparently

Chapter 7 edit is up. The word count jumped by about 1200 words so while I didn't really change the main thrust of the scenes there's enough added material that it may be worth a reread for continuity's sake. Starting on Chapter 8 now, which will probably not get much larger than it is because it's mostly introspection/conversation. Hopefully. XD

 

I saw a thing on twitter and now I have a weird craving for G1 Optimus/Skyfire fic. There are a couple of really good sizekink fics with that pairing but they're both short and i really want to read a long plotty thing too. :c

 

Yellin with a friend about various missteps made in TF canons over the years on Curiouscat and it reminds me that I'd like to do a redesign of Thunderblast for Rise. She's literally in the fic because I saw her page on tfwiki and thought "Oh my god." I've been looking for more 'femme' characters to introduce since I started writing, and Thunderblast has a cool ass name but god, that design. I'd like to redesign most of the characters tbh, but she's got to be top of the list lmao.

On a related note, I'm not actually using the flashback design from TFP for Orion Pax, because I found some concept art online and kinda fell in love lmao. I wanna tweak his audials and give him the cheek vents Optimus had, and make his back-mounted wheels a bit smaller, but other than that it's pretty close.

Spoiler

Ignore the big grey box, this was a background graphic I made for my old rp blog XD. The original art was apparently by Tyler Scarlet, but it's come out of a concept art book or something and I can't find an official source online.

 

Chapter 8 just went up. It did end up expanding by about 700 words, because I decided some of my worldbuilding wrt Orion's translation work was worded confusingly and THEN i realised it was worded confusingly because it was one of the things i'd thought up originally like the day i wrote it and some of the basic assumptions had since been written out of the story. Sometimes I wish I was less impatient a poster XD

 

Finally got around to mapping out the south pole! :D

Spoiler

Vos and Centurion included for bearing :D

The area enclosed by red dotted lines is the Southern Rust Belt, a more or less continuous streak of intense industrial activity going northeast from Kaon to the Titanium Highlands and across to the southern Tagan Heights, where it kinda smooshes against the leading edge of the Heights. It's the most densely populated bit of Cybertron by a fair amount, with parts of Kaon and the Twin Cities reaching estimates of upwards of a million mecha per square league, but even the rural land between the great city-states is filled with smaller cities, towns, mining settlements, various industrial parks with permanent residents (how most of the smaller cities began).

...aaaand I forgot Helex. Gygax took its place apparently, so Helex is gonna be a little east of it, south of Mebion.

 

Finally some good fucking robot meta food =A=)b

 

Aaaaa, thank you! :D Someday I’ll get around to finishing it all, lol.
I started university this week and I’m only taking two classes this semester but hoo boy it’s an adjustment lol. Said classes are however giving me inspo for worldbuilding tho — I’m taking sort of intro human geography and geology classes — so hopefully I’ll find some time and brainpower to get to it xD

 

Eyyy congrats to uni!!

 

Thank you! :D I've been waiting for this for literal years, aaaaaaa

(We're doing continental drift in the next geology lecture I'm pretty sure, and I know we probably won't cover much cause the lecturer has to cover all the basics of igneous rocks and volcanos and shit in like three weeks but aaaaaa, my faves. Especially if we get to talk about supercontinents. I want to know EVERYTHING.)

...Still trying to figure out how Cybertronian geology works lol. Like clearly they can't have normal planet shit, because formation-by-Primus doesn't really allow for tectonic circulation, but also if they don't have that then how do they get mountains and shit?? I've got one thought right now and that's basically Primus being the equivalent of a restless sleeper and the Tagan Heights being the planetary equivalent of when you toss and turn on a hot night and the sheets all end up falling off one side of ur bed. :'D

 

Ohhh I like that idea

I had just assumed that the planet has had some plate tectonics and shit but went inert at some point but FRANKLY I like 'primus sleeps restlessly' a lot better.

 

If making suggestions is okay (and I totally get if it isn't, I'm super possessive of my own meta so feel free to ignore the rest of this message) I always liked the idea that the upper layers are sort of loose and behave in geologically interesting ways, except for the fixed spots that are pretty similar in construction to armour anchor points on regular mecha. So there are parts that are solid all the way to the deep, but most of it is kind of loose and "floating" on various magnetic fields/orbiting around the spots that are solid all the way to the deep. Also, Cybertron has been dug up and constructed over so many time that the very deepest parts around the core have collapsed into broadly-solid mass due to gravity.

 

I've thought a lot about Cybertronian geology before - is it ok to talk about here or are we taking over your thread?

 

Quickly posting a reply to say that yes, sharing your thoughts is very welcome here! :D And the opposite too, if anyone wants to take any of my stuff and build onto it, feel free to do so. The only time I object to ppl taking my headcanons is when I've done actual nice pretty graphics for it and ppl repost them without crediting/actually fuckin impersonate me lmfao. (That actually happened once... i can still hardly believe it lmao)

I stayed up way too late last night researching and I have some Cybertron Geology Thoughts now, will try to share them in another comment with some replies but I'm posting this now cause I have to go and pick my dog up from the vet this afternoon and I have no idea when, so who knows how long it'll take to write it all up sdhghj

 

also my friend did a thing based on that terrible new windblade figure and i love it. I've been challenged to do a TFP Optimus version and it's going to happen i s2g

 

R.E. Cybertronian geology --

So, going with the origin story in Prime (more or less), Cybertron is a planet formed from/around the hibernating body of Primus. My thought is that Primus (and Unicron, consequentially) works kind of like my sparked cities, in that there's a 'skeleton body' that can be built upon BUT if necessary the built-up parts can be shed/recycled to allow Primus to fuck off and do whatever without carrying a whole planet around (my Cybertron is also bigger than Earth, although not by that much I think). Unlike my sparked cities, however, shedding this extra mass results in the destruction of the planet - so it's kind of a last resort, as long as you give a fuck about what's crawling around on your surface.

What exactly is Primus? Not sure yet. Something like a sentient star, but small and not particularly dense. Cybertron has a very dense core, and its gravity is stronger than might be expected of a planet its size. I don't know how much by yet, because I want humans to be able to visit, but I might just have to invent some antigrav shit for them lmao. I still can't make up my mind what to do with Primus' pronouns lol, Part of me wants to keep my job simple and use he/him, part of me wants to go for they/them bc neutrality, another part of me wants to just make something up, and then yet another brain cell wants to avoid pronouns entirely. In Cybertronian languages I'm p sure that there's a pronoun or some similar construction that's used for Primus alone. Decisions, decisions...

Primus' 'skeleton body' folds down into an 'alt-mode' that's more or less an enclosure for a primordial spark. Primus, recovering from the battle against Unicron, went dormant for a long time, entering this alt-mode form and drifting through the young universe, and along the way the alt-mode collected a shit ton of space dust and material left over from the Big Bang and formation of stars and whatever, gradually collecting a mineral skin. Primus used these collected minerals to recuperate, and then had the great idea of creating the Thirteen - which were also formed out of that space dust, purified and alloyed together by Primus and given life with a spark split from Primus' own. And then the Thirteen got together and had their own kids, and Primus was like "Ah. I have grandchildren."

SO. There are... three? layers to Cybertron. The central core, which is rather large and all Primus; an intermediate layer, which is made up primarily of sensibly-arranged Space Dust and is sort of solid, sort of not because of Freaky Primus Shit, and also some of Primus' skeleton frame and a few extra structures left over from when the Thirteen were being built and trained; and then a surface layer which is more or less analogous to the Earth's crust, formed of the most recent Space Stuff acquired by Primus (during the Dynasty of Primes and especially the Cataclysm).

The core is immobile, most of the time (pls insert the free real estate meme here, only with Megatron holding some dark energon) because if the core moves, Shit Is Going Down. The bits of Primus' skeleton in the intermediate layer move occasionally, very slowly, in search of more nutrients, which drags the surface layer around in turn. The surface layer doesn't move that much, so it's not divided into tectonic plates. It's not 100% whole either. There are crumple zones, such as the Main Divide and the Manganese Mountains, where two regions of the surface are being pushed together and thickening, folding, fracturing and welding back together under the pressure. There are fracture zones, where the surface is being pulled apart in all sorts of directions and so the crust thins and a complex system of rift valleys and depressions opens up - one of these runs from the northeastern Sea of Rust up into the Mitteous Plateau, a former crumple zone now being worn down by erosion. The Polar Depression around Iacon was heading this way, but then the centre of activity shifted south, narrowly avoiding Tyrest.

There are also uplift zones, where the surface layer is being pushed up by some activity beneath in the intermediate layer - this is the central Tagan Heights, a high rifted plateau with extensive crumple zones on either side. The average ground level in the Central Tagan Plateau is about 6 leagues above the average ground level for the rest of the planet (something like 10km, idk, i never did the math that closely), and the highest peak in the Heights comes up to 17 leagues (google tells me this is 28km? idk i failed my last math class lol).

(I was wondering if my conception of the Tagan Heights was a bit Out There, considering it takes up a good chunk of one whole atmosphere, but then I found out about Tharsis on Mars and I was like i'm yoinking that. The Tagan Heights has no enormous shield volcanoes alas, because I don't think it fits with that I've got here? But now I'm thinking about Primus' exhaust, where does it go?? and I can't tell you how much I would fucking love to have pseudovolcanic features that are basically just God farting.)

 

u know what, i don't care how much geology i have to handwave, i'm gonna have rich ppl immersing themselves in primus' farts bc it's ""healthy" if its the last thing i do.

 

I got watching a bunch of documentaries last night and I'm suddenly very hyped for ground-effect vehicles. :D I think I have enough large interconnected flat or near-flat surfaces to make them a viable high-speed option for my Cybertronian freight network, which would be cheaper to run than conventional aircraft/shuttles, more fuel-efficient, and capable of carrying heavier loads. I could also solve some of the issues of RL GEVs by taking advantage of Cybertronian technology - they need a lot of energy to take off, don't operate well at low speeds, and they're not very maneuverable, but if we're talking sparked mecha with alt-modes here I feel like a... transitional propulsion system might help. Apparently they get more stable as they get larger, and can fly higher? but I heard this in a youtube video and I can't find it elsewhere yet so [shrugs].

Also, they're fucking beautiful. :D I want them on that merit alone tbh lmao

Spoiler

 

If Cybetron has large "continents" that are ferromagnetic, railless maglev is also an option.

 

hmmm, that's a thought. I have maglev in the story, but i don't know much about how it works so idk if i can have it without rails. (Tbh i have to figure out what's going on with my sediments lmao; i've got erosion and therefore there must be some soil buildup in at least some places. That might be part of why the plains areas are so extensive XD) Would it still work with soil, or do I need denser land?

 

*thinky face* I'll have to do some research too, but my initial reaction is that that's gonna be a problem, because unless it's heavily compressed, the topsoil is going to go flying, and also I'm not entirely sure how magnetised particles behave, it could even be that the repulsion effect can't be properly achieved. Anywhere that has a loose topsoil but a harder plate surface/bedrock underneath should be fine, though.

One option is to place ground transportation on a continuum from tyres/treads to GEVs, with maglev, hovercraft and possibly even special-construction hydrofoil/hydroplane frames between them, depending on what sort of environment they're crossing. Hell, there's no reason why "skimmer" frames can't have maglev, hydrofoil or GEV modes they use based on the needs :D