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Description
Comments, crits and questions are welcome and encouraged!

RAVAGE
Function: Combat Intelligence
Strength: 3
Speed: 6
Firepower: 6
Skill: 4
Ravage is the most heavily armed of Soundwave’s drones, outfitted with a pair of light gatling guns and a compliment of twelve stinger missiles. Unlike Laserbeak and Rumble, Ravage is specifically designed to engage full-sized Transformers in combat. His primary function is to gather data about the Autobots’ combat tactics for use in Decepticon battles strategies, though he also works particularly well as a diversionary agent.

LASERBEAK
Function: Aerial Espionage
Strength: 6
Speed: 8
Firepower: 4
Skill: 6
Laserbeak acts as the Decepticons’ eye in the sky, charting the topography of their new home and surveying the affairs of Autobots and humans alike. His keen optical and audio sensors make him the ideal spy, an activity in which he takes great pleasure. Though armed only with a pair of small blasters, Laserbeak’s sharp talons are a dangerous melee, weapon and his small profile and high speed make him a difficult target to hit.

RUMBLE
Function: Energon Courier
Strength: 5
Speed: 3
Firepower: 2
Skill: 5
Unlike Ravage and Laserbeak’s animalistic natures, Rumble seems to possess a limited degree of sentience, though he is incapable of speech or complex thought. Rumble’s main purpose is to serve as a living power cell of sorts; his specialized piston-arms are able to draw energon reserves from below the earth’s surface, which are then stored in his large backpack. This energon can then be used to power machinery or even repair wounded Decepticons. Rumble’s pistons also act as his main weapons, and can be charged with electrical power courtesy of any stored energon.

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No tech specs becuase they're not important enough. Nothing much to say about these guys, actually. Ravage and Laserbeak's "robot" modes are nothing new. But yeah, the drones basically turn into gigantic USB flash drives. I didn't exactly set out to make them such, they just worked with the concept I had for Soundwave and his vehicle mode. And when you think about it, they're pretty similar in function to their original altmodes, being devices designed to store data in soe form.

I actually gave a lot of thought to how Soundwave and the drones would work as a toy. They'd all come in one package together; an Ultra- or Leader-class so it would have electronics (Soundwave himself would probably be closer to a Mega/Voyager in size due to the resources and budget alotted to the drones' engineering). When a drone is placed into Soundwave's communications array thing, tabs inside the "tab" of their storage mode depress a button in Soundwave's "port" and activates a sound when a button on Soundwave is pressed. And all three drones engage different sounds. Something like that.

I guess the only other thing I can comment on is Rumble since he's relatively original. Since he's the analogue to the Team Fortress 2 Engineer's dispenser (Ravage is a mobile sentry turret and Laserbeak was originally going to be able to carry other troops to act sort of like the teleporter), I wanted to give him the piledriver arms of G1 Rumble and Frenzy so he could leech energon from the ground. As such I thought Rumble was a more appropriate name than Frenzy (who I was planning on doing originally). He's black/red to match the other drones (and to not clash with Soundwave's colors), even though I've always been more of a FIRRIB proponent. The camera-lens face is actually based on the drones from the first movie's video game; I figured it acted as a "face" without portraying emotion of any sort. It's also kind of throwing a bone to movie Frenzy, since I would have like to incorporate more of his design into Rumble, but the boxy storage mode wasn't having it.

If you go back and look at Soundwave, you'll see that Rumble's colors don't quite match the ones here. It's because I am dumb and didn't think to map beforehand out how his colors would look in robot mode. Basically, the red stripes on his arms were originally bright blue "energon vents" but it looked like shit.

Oh, one last thing; while I generally don't take too much artistic liberty with the full size characters in respect to their "toy" engineering, these guys are pretty stylized, Ravage and Laserbeak in particular. A necessary evil for such small characters with such simple transformations.

Revision Edits (4/14/14): No, I didn't forget about these guys. They finally get the new background, and with it, individual tech specs! The numbers are admittedly a little arbitrary and I could probably be talked out of some of them. The robot mode illustrations remain unchanged, but I redrew the storage modes because they were originally drawn with nothing but the line tool and looked hyper shitty. Redrawn with a brush, they come out looking a little wobblier but overall they look better to my eye, I dunno. Other than that, the colors get a slight change (mostly making the red a little more rusty) to match the changes I made to Soundwave... what, two years ago, now?

Next: Arcee! Pretty excited about her.

Description
Comments, crits and questions are welcome and encouraged!

RAVAGE
Function: Combat Intelligence
Strength: 3
Speed: 6
Firepower: 6
Skill: 4
Ravage is the most heavily armed of Soundwave’s drones, outfitted with a pair of light gatling guns and a compliment of twelve stinger missiles. Unlike Laserbeak and Rumble, Ravage is specifically designed to engage full-sized Transformers in combat. His primary function is to gather data about the Autobots’ combat tactics for use in Decepticon battles strategies, though he also works particularly well as a diversionary agent.

LASERBEAK
Function: Aerial Espionage
Strength: 6
Speed: 8
Firepower: 4
Skill: 6
Laserbeak acts as the Decepticons’ eye in the sky, charting the topography of their new home and surveying the affairs of Autobots and humans alike. His keen optical and audio sensors make him the ideal spy, an activity in which he takes great pleasure. Though armed only with a pair of small blasters, Laserbeak’s sharp talons are a dangerous melee, weapon and his small profile and high speed make him a difficult target to hit.

RUMBLE
Function: Energon Courier
Strength: 5
Speed: 3
Firepower: 2
Skill: 5
Unlike Ravage and Laserbeak’s animalistic natures, Rumble seems to possess a limited degree of sentience, though he is incapable of speech or complex thought. Rumble’s main purpose is to serve as a living power cell of sorts; his specialized piston-arms are able to draw energon reserves from below the earth’s surface, which are then stored in his large backpack. This energon can then be used to power machinery or even repair wounded Decepticons. Rumble’s pistons also act as his main weapons, and can be charged with electrical power courtesy of any stored energon.

-------------------------------------------------

No tech specs becuase they're not important enough. Nothing much to say about these guys, actually. Ravage and Laserbeak's "robot" modes are nothing new. But yeah, the drones basically turn into gigantic USB flash drives. I didn't exactly set out to make them such, they just worked with the concept I had for Soundwave and his vehicle mode. And when you think about it, they're pretty similar in function to their original altmodes, being devices designed to store data in soe form.

I actually gave a lot of thought to how Soundwave and the drones would work as a toy. They'd all come in one package together; an Ultra- or Leader-class so it would have electronics (Soundwave himself would probably be closer to a Mega/Voyager in size due to the resources and budget alotted to the drones' engineering). When a drone is placed into Soundwave's communications array thing, tabs inside the "tab" of their storage mode depress a button in Soundwave's "port" and activates a sound when a button on Soundwave is pressed. And all three drones engage different sounds. Something like that.

I guess the only other thing I can comment on is Rumble since he's relatively original. Since he's the analogue to the Team Fortress 2 Engineer's dispenser (Ravage is a mobile sentry turret and Laserbeak was originally going to be able to carry other troops to act sort of like the teleporter), I wanted to give him the piledriver arms of G1 Rumble and Frenzy so he could leech energon from the ground. As such I thought Rumble was a more appropriate name than Frenzy (who I was planning on doing originally). He's black/red to match the other drones (and to not clash with Soundwave's colors), even though I've always been more of a FIRRIB proponent. The camera-lens face is actually based on the drones from the first movie's video game; I figured it acted as a "face" without portraying emotion of any sort. It's also kind of throwing a bone to movie Frenzy, since I would have like to incorporate more of his design into Rumble, but the boxy storage mode wasn't having it.

If you go back and look at Soundwave, you'll see that Rumble's colors don't quite match the ones here. It's because I am dumb and didn't think to map beforehand out how his colors would look in robot mode. Basically, the red stripes on his arms were originally bright blue "energon vents" but it looked like shit.

Oh, one last thing; while I generally don't take too much artistic liberty with the full size characters in respect to their "toy" engineering, these guys are pretty stylized, Ravage and Laserbeak in particular. A necessary evil for such small characters with such simple transformations.

Revision Edits (4/14/14): No, I didn't forget about these guys. They finally get the new background, and with it, individual tech specs! The numbers are admittedly a little arbitrary and I could probably be talked out of some of them. The robot mode illustrations remain unchanged, but I redrew the storage modes because they were originally drawn with nothing but the line tool and looked hyper shitty. Redrawn with a brush, they come out looking a little wobblier but overall they look better to my eye, I dunno. Other than that, the colors get a slight change (mostly making the red a little more rusty) to match the changes I made to Soundwave... what, two years ago, now?

Next: Arcee! Pretty excited about her.