My garbage brain instantly started to convince me I can't do this

Oh no, worldbuildingex sign ups are open and I am suddenly having the worst cold feet despite being really excited for this in the first place.

It's only like what, 2000 words for a finished story and I can write in-universe meta, I can probably do this standing on my head but

oh no

Miner backstories

Pulled from a conversation with some friends of mine, lately I've been thinking about Impactor and his leadership skills a lot and I started thinking that instead of being a self-taught bossman like Megatron, it could be interesting if he was actually forged to occupy a team leader position inside the mining crew.

One of the things I don't think is explored enough is that Impactor really has to be bonkers competent for the Wreckers to be as effective as they are. Part of it is having "the best", but no one tool or weapon can win a fight by itself, it's all about how you manoeuver your staff into position and what sort of plan of attack or defense you have. I definitely write Impactor as a kind of a crazy-as-a-fox tactician, who relies on having excellent situational awareness and judgement on how to best utilise his resources -- knowing who to move into what position, and how to match up his own forces against the enemy[1], but doing so with the kind of demented high-risk flair you probably expect when you hear "Wreckers". Also, being a small and self-contained unit, the Wreckers need to have well-considered logistics and operational planning to get theirs where they need to be with the ammo and fuel they need to do their job there, because as special ops they can't exactly afford to rely on Autobot supply chains.

And a lot of those skills -- scheduling, logistics and cargo managing -- are stuff you need to know if you're managing almost any kind of a team. Even at a low level, say... at the level of your own work crew as a part of a larger excavation unit. So, I think it would be interesting if at least between him, D-16 and Terminus, Impactor was actually the one with the nominal leadership role, and I think it would be especially interesting his nominal leadership wasn't just the main digging unit of three of them, but the whole assembly of excavation, extraction (i.e. transportation for pickup), construction (such as levelling and building supports) and also scheduling of the whole operation, from getting his crew to the work site and keeping them fueled and on task.

It was probably quite informal, since above Impactor there definitely were work site managers and operational managers who were the ones doing the backend, such as site scheduling and resource management, Impactor wouldn't have had a lot of control over the circumstances and wouldn't have been responsible for a lot of decisions concerning his crew, but it would give him the baseline needed to move over into strategic and field management, and something to build on as the Wreckers got bigger as they went.

( Footnotes )