#maximal command

Dear Eschatological Equestrian,

As I've discussed in the past, Unicron is not a creative god, and as such it's only natural for him to return to the same ideas on several occasions. One such incarnation of this unit consisted of dimensionally-abducted warriors, who were each claimed at a point in their timeline when they may otherwise have perished, ensuring a seed of loyalty with which Unicron was able to shackle them.

These horsemen consisted of:

...Death, a longtime servant of Unicron who had once been known as Battle Unicorn, and who was responsible for ensuring the Maximal Council were in no state to resist the Dark God's Culling.

...War, a Mach Kick who once followed the Liege Maximo, and who was plucked from battle, saving him from being bisected by Arcee.

...Pestilence, who had been Sir Sire, a noble member of the Maximal Army, only nano-kliks away from being converted into a Vehicon drone when Unicron "rescued" him.

Dear Erudite Explorer,

The Maximals spearheaded a number of exploration initiatives in the years before Megatron’s conquest of Cybertron and the ensuing Spark War. Some missions simply involved scanning and logging habitable planets from orbit, but most starships carried a cargo of protoforms and a number of basic prefabricated components that would allow a single ship to seed simple outposts on several dozen worlds and establish a transwarp link to Cybertron. A crew might spend a period of time exploring a particularly noteworthy planet—surveying interesting native life or conducting geological surveys for rich veins of energon—or they might simply drop a cargo of protoforms on a life-bearing planet and quickly move on.

As the post-war Cybertronian society gradually expanded its aegis across interstellar space, the Maximal High Council expected that it would gradually “link up” with these remote facilities and provide them with the equipment, manpower, and resources required to build these basic outposts up into full-fledged colonies—however, only a handful of worlds developed in this way before the Vehicon onslaught permanently ended any attempts at a third Cybertronian empire.

Dear Sleepy Savant,

In general, no, as most bots with sloth alt-modes tend to fade into the background. On Cybertron, they often transformed into signal amplifiers or internet routers, partnering with larger bots who transformed into radio-transmitting towers and broadcast antennae. Thus, on Earth, the tree-bound, low-energy sloth was a compatible beast form.

I can speak of one slothformer, Slo-Mo, who was sent to ancient Earth via transwarp drive by Maximal Command to provide long-term surveillance after Optimus Primal's Beast Expedition to visit the crashed Ark ended 4 million years ago. After her tour of duty ended, she relocated to planet Antilla where she discovered the remains of an Autobot colony that had fallen to cosmic rust. She received a transwarp order from Maximal Command to intervene with history and signal-boost the warning beacon, hoping to avoid a cosmic rust plague in the Maximals' own timeline. She did so for 500,000 years until Perceptor created corrostop in 1985.

Dear Changed Agenda,

In one version of the Beast Wars- well, they never happened! The Axalon critically damaged the Darksyde in space before it could engage its transwarp drive. The Axalon reported the successful attack to Maximal Command and detected no life signs within. As the Maximals returned to space exploration, the drifting Darksyde came across Unicron. He extracted the nearly-dead Predacons and reformatted them. Megatron was reconfigured into Galavratron, a fearsome multi-changer who possessed dragon, snapper turtle and beetle alt modes. His underlings were similarly reformatted into Jetstorm, Tankor, and Thrustor, their personalities utterly overwritten in his service; later, the re-emergence of Thrustor's original identity caused quite a shock!