#sparktype

A spark is the core lifeforce of a Cybertronian, housed in the chest area and responsible both for a bot's physical ability to move and mental ability to think. Without a spark, a Cybertronian might be forced to move with manually entered commands, but would not be "living" in any recognizable sense.

Sparks can be categorized by three different means:

Radiance: The amount of energy output. Visibly affects the color of the spark, tied to frame sustainability.

Resonance: The frequency at which energy is output, loosely tied to radiance. Invisible, largely inconsequential unless you're a combiner.

Configuration: The purpose the spark is able to fulfill.

Radiance

A spark's radiance is how bright it is. The spectrum of spark colors ranges from near-white to almost black purple, like so:

There are eight levels of brightness, called lux. A bot with a lux of 1 is the dimmest a spark can be, with a lux of 8 being the absolute brightest. The spectrum is divided up like so:

For medical use, it gets divided further into decimals. So this is a spark with a lux of 2.8

And this is one with a lux of 6.5

It can go as far down the decimal trail as you need for perfect precision, but it swiftly declines in usefulness after the first decimal place.

Spark radiance determines both the maximum capacity of weight a frame can support and how efficient a spark is at maintaining its energy. The higher the lux, the bigger and more powerful you can be, but also the more energon you need to power your systems with. It's a tradeoff.

Resonance

A spark's resonance is the frequency at which it outputs energy, typically measured by being translated to sound. This is closely correlated to, but not 1:1 tied to, a spark's radiance. A high-lux spark is more likely to output a higher-pitched frequency, while a low-lux spark is more likely to output low pitch.

Generally speaking, spark resonance has little use medically, with the exception of combiner teams; in order to support the larger frame for an extended period of time, the component sparks have to be identical in resonance, or else the non-matching one will be a sink on energy and cause the combiner to fall apart.

Resonance is measured in cycles per nanoklik: ie, how many complete waves of high frequency energy are output within the span of a single nanoklik. The range is as follows:

A combiner team could be made of of bots with varying colors between 3 and 5 lux, so long as they all have a resonance of 4 cycles per nanoklik. On the other hand, if a bot with 1 lux had a resonance of 1 cpnk, and another 1-lux bot had a resonance of 2, they wouldn't be able to sustain form.

Configuration

This is probably the most important part of a spark, as it dictates the abilities a given Cybertronian is capable of, as well as how to handle them medically. You can tell a bot's configuration at a glance by the spark chamber: the exterior has nodes along the outside that shine sparklight in lines and pinpricks like constellations, and bots of a certain configuration (excluding Aberrant) will all have the same patterns.

Configuration is by category, divided into five:

Standard: This makes up the vast majority of bots, at about an 80% rate.

Titanic: Metrotitan sparks. So rare that they're practically unheard of, maybe one every few million years.

Harmonic: Cityspeaker sparks. They closely mimic Titanic sparks, which allow the bots that bear them to communicate with the cities they live in. Less than 1% of the population, back during Cybertron's heyday.

Accordant: Sparks that are optimized to conserve energy in a sparkmeld. These are the only sparks that are viable for combiner teams. Roughly 8% of the population.

Aberrant: Any spark that has unique configuration nodes rather than a pre-set pattern. This is what makes triple changers, minicons, and a host of other bots that don't fit the normal specs for whatever reason. They need a skilled medic to handle them; most doctors prioritize preset training, and Aberrant sparks require the ability to diagnose and adapt without a template to work off of. Everyone with this sparktype is uniquely Abberant, but it most often manifests in size differences. Roughly 12% of the population.