- The Vehicons are a faction the Beast Machines portion of the Generation One / Beast Era continuity family.
Mindless. Obedient. Radioactive. Pokéball.
Most Vehicons are sparkless drones with no innate sentience or spark. Each Vehicon drone is usually controlled either directly by Megatron, or by a single sentient Vehicon general of the same (or similar) design. After the loss of Tankor and Jetstorm, their respective drones are apparently controlled by other generals.
Vehicon drones are, in almost all cases, mindless cannon-fodder, blindly obedient, with no sense of self-preservation. However, on a few occasions Copter Drones and Motorcycle Drones have appeared to use emotive body language, shaking in apparent fear or pleading (wordlessly) not to be shot. These brief spurts of personality were probably just a stylistic choice by the director (to make the scene clearer), and not an indicator that the drones are more than drones. On one occasion a Tank Drone vocalizes with Tankor's voice, but this may have been an animation error The Weak Component.
Fiction
In the Beast Machines cartoon continuity, Megatron overthrows Cybertron by overrunning it with thousands of Vehicon drones built from the recycled bodies of fallen, de-sparked Cybertron citizens. After the Maximals crash-landed on Cybertron, Megatron dispatched tank and cycle drones armed with gas canisters that temporarily weakened or incapacitated them. After their escape and their reformatting at the hands of the Oracle, Vehicons seem to run set patrol paths in a certain area.
Drone types
- Sonic Attack Jets, led by Jetstorm
- Copter Drones, led by Obsidian
- Heavy Artillery Drones, led by Strika
- Vehicon Moles, led by Megatron
- Motorcycle Drones, led by Thrust
- Tank Drones, led by Tankor