The New Garage Chronicles

IDW'05 fandom would be a lot less obnoxious to me if they could, like... accept that they really only are here for a specific continuity or a specific title in that continuity rather than trying to present their opinions, branding and communal culture as universal to all TF fans.

I was sick of this shit in 2018 where a very bad interaction I had with someone led me to write off the comics for a solid three years and I am sick of this shit now when I've read some of the titles everyone in the fandom seems to fucking loathe while the fan favourite still does absolutely nothing for me after multiple attempts at giving it a go.

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So, there’s a couple of posts around mecha body language around that are very focused on bauplan, build and social status as the reasons for why some mecha act and comport themselves the way they do, and… I always find those posts overly reductive and kind of bio-essentialist and think they lack consideration for what kind of social spaces – both the conditions and the actual physical space – and social conditions mecha are used to.

Heavier construction and thicker armour, like the type you see with warframes like Optimus or Ultra Magnus, does generally linearly correlate with less subtle body language, but more so because a large percentage of heavy labour mecha are used to being tightly packed together, in mines and on assembly and refinery straights, so they rely on EM background radiation and verbal cues for communicating close up what medium freight and service frames communicate at a distance with body language. When you’re used to everyone standing within touching (or at least shoving) distance, verbal and subverbal cues become more important than visually distinct posture.

The one time you do get big, expressive body language out of heavy warframes and labour frames is in a conflict situation. Social conflict, see, is very bimodal for labour frames. If you’re already stuck on shift with someone, it’s in both of your best interest to bear down and just cope, resulting in social interfacing with zero friction as both mecha try to get away from each other as fast as they can. But if you aren’t already stuck with someone, then the best way to ensure you won’t be is to make them back off by laying on the physical intimidation.

This is also why minibots and lightweight service and custodial mecha (as well as most scientific instruments) generally have body language more recognisable to heavy industrial and warframes. Along with their tough construction leaving little mobility in their substructures, they’re similarly used to working in tight corners, under floors and inside vents – spaces that share physical traits with mine shafts and refineries more than the broad dock grounds or office buildings – so their body language does tend towards either understated or overbearing.

Similarly, large haulers, terrestrial shuttles and civillian airframes – all of whose works involve high speeds and large distances – converge on the body language typical of high performance ground frames. Partially because high-performance ground frames are what they mostly interact with, but also b/c the access to a physically larger social environment allows for communication that is better parseable from a distance, as well as favouring frames who are capable of making microadjustments to their own aerodynamics. As social flexibility increases, so does the necessity for being able to adjust your presentation and posture to match, too – not all high-performance frames are highly physically expressive, and not all industrial frames are laconic, but rather there’s a sort of a happy medium that frames from various classes codeswitch into with each other.

Although, honestly, airframes are sort of their own mess, because generally the spaces they operate in, the only times they’re in such close quarters with each other that body language and posture (rather than verbal or radiant communication) become significant are if they’re working in a cross-frame environment, or if they’re operating as a flight – and that latter requires an absolutely astounding clarity of communication, because manoeuvers at the high general cruising speeds they have to maintain even one person lagging on a turn can cause a crash at pulverising speeds for everyone else.

As a result, to ground frames air frames seem extremely prone to large physical displays, getting the maximum utility out of their middle-of-the-pack aerodynamic flaring (yes, wings and rotors can move, but generally airframes are already optimised to a certain kind of aerodynamic profile, and the rest of their plating can be quite rigid), but amongst themselves, even seeker body language can seem quite subdued to an outsider, because a lot of the necessary communication is done as radio and radar communication, and by maintaining a flight-wide EM equillibrium. Maybe seeker tendency to trine up is partially to create a more malleable social space, instead of every time having to match up the communicative needs of whole six individuals.

Also – the majority of air frames kind of wrap back around to sharing traits with heavy warframes, whose social distances match airframes on the ground, but who suppress a lot of that body language in order to be able to function as a part of a team or a squad, creating a lot of that same no-friction conflict you see with industrial frames. Rabbit-like displays of “I’m so much happier than you are” are not a seeker trait, they’re a warframe trait.

Beastformers have hands down the widest variety of body language expressiveness, and have similarly different ranges of body language and posture depending on whether they’re operating as individuals or in a group, but unfortunately their bauplan makes a lot of that body language hard to parse for bipedal mecha, and also their lack of reliance on radiant communication (both radio and verbal, which is why even large beastformers are often stealthier than equivalent weight class mecha from other frame types) creates huge gaps in communication.

Managed to put a few more things from this into ITB but also unfortunately added stuff. The work, it never ends.

( Beep boop )

I've actually got a lot of my headcanon histories for characters written out, they just need to be cleaned up and posted.

My fill for the ""Inaccurate" Religious Figure" on my Banned Together Bingo card.

Read on Ao3

(Hehehehohohohoho oh man I feel like such a rascal after writing that.)

(Now available on Tumblr.)

What brought this on was me talking to Bri about medical frames -- how medical flight frames are a tiny minority and out of them the majority of them are rotaries. Which, y'know, makes sense because in the real world, medical jets aren't... exactly practical. Helicopters can take off and land in a far greater variety of places, they're far more stable and flexible and for human purposes, their carry capacity... is fine... but

But.

When you think about it, most rotaries we see aren't particularly more flexible with where an how they can fly -- VTOL is largely standard, even for big shuttleframes (although as I've argued elsewhere, that's probably just when they've got light loads) -- and also most rotaries aren't big enough to do medevac either way, acting more as field medics like their grounder counterparts. In that sense medijets make way more sense in that role -- they're faster and have an easier time getting around, even while grounders still beat them out in sturdiness and evac ability.

And that's already quite interesting until you put it together with how there aren't many civillian jets in general. Smaller airframes are almost uniformly soldiers, to the degree to which medics and scientists with airframes are pointed out as being a thing that is Consistently Weird in-universe. So, does this imply that rotaries -- many of whom are also warframes, let's be clear -- are considered a more "civillian" class of aiframes than fixed-wings? There must be some interesting interactions there also with how shuttle and tanker frames are considered "less ideal" fliers.

But at the same time... rotaries probably have a much easier time operating in occluded areas, as they're not nearly as reliant on radar and tacnav as flightframes whose cruising speeds are so high as to be unsafe. On an open front -- the kind of fighting you'd expect aerial frames to mostly engage in -- rotaries objectively the worse choice over jetframes for medics, but that kind of just leaves aerial and seeker units without any medical support.

Is that a cultural thing? Or is that also simply practical?

There's interesting things out there beyond the Doylist explanations.

Sometimes I think elaborate politics thoughts about Megatron and how much I'm frustrated by my inability to agree with him because he's kinda right??? About a lot of things??? Essentialism is stupid and people need to be judged by their ability and not their class, and arbitrary hierarchies will always result in oppression because being put in order creates a sense of normalcy about the differences between the classes, and I fundamentally agree with that being undemocratic and unfair for everyone involved

and then I remember that I've described him as a libertarian who thinks STEM will save the world or an outright ancap who hates negotiation that doesn't involve people who mindlessly agree with him on everything and I remember oh yeah, it's because I wouldn't want him to hold ANY office out of fear that he'd use it to break the system that put him there.

... and also, y'know. The mech supremacy.

Welp, I went down another air traffic research hole, fuck me.

In any sort of happy-end intergrated future society, I can imagine flight frames probably haaate trying to land near large airports, because they'd probably need to be under ATC so as not to disrupt the holding patterns too badly, which for them means a lot of dull "waiting in traffic" and then some more dull waiting around until they make it to the designated area for transforming into root mode, or needing to walk like three miles just to wait in line for takeoff from a runway they don't even need.

I can also imagine the various heart attacks various air traffic controllers have, trying to deal with some idiot flyboys capable of near-vertical climb after VTOL, not realising human reaction time Does Not Work Like That, needing for all sorts of restricted flight zones for flight-capable individuals. And they gotta subject themselves to this every time they want any kind of service while grounders can get it Fragging Everywhere because this dumbass species is hopelessly land-bound.

Also -- air traffic chatter is really specific, so I wonder if they'd also have to start using similar designation as human aircraft (essentially fancy registration numbers) or if that's just all sorts of beneath someone who spends fully half their life flying. Like, no, they probably wouldn't wait for permission to take off from any nearby air control unit so giving them a flight designation number would be kind of pointless, but I can see them needing to have consistent recognition/radar IFF so that they can be picked up on and the humans in the air can be warned of their presence, and probably have some kind of a call sign so they can be contacted and told to Cut That Shit Out In Our Airspace, There Are Squishy Humans Up There Too.

Of course there's probably, like. A small minority of flight frames who look at the whole "getting paid to fly all over the place" and go "sweet" but IDK how many of them would go into passenger traffic. Cargo traffic? Sure. The containers won't complain when you do corkscrews in the air, after all. (But I like the idea that those who might have the patience for it would go into, like, medevac and on lines that aren't safely operable by human pilots, and the rest are Fancy-Aft Exceptions like Sky Lynx.)

So I'm up to Chapter 5 with "Introduction to Biomechanics" and honestly I'm not even to the stuff I think is genuinely interesting and I'm already feeling like the cleverest goddamn person on the planet.

Like, once you dig, you can absolutely find non-human explanations for seemingly-human features, all it really takes is questioning your premises and not being lazy.

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 )

Speaking of Optimus, I definitely wish there was more content that contended with him being, like, an actual demigod.

I want more stories, especially war rumours, about how he's quite literally an unstoppable war machine, about how he's inhumanly strong and fast, and most of all durable to the point of being indestructible. Like, give me Divine Abomination Optimus Prime, who seems to operate with entirely different demands and limitations as the mere mortals around him, who can shrug off almost any damage and keep fighting through any injury, seemingly only animated by the Matrix and definitely beyond the limitations of regular warfare.

And also -- I want more things about how Decepticon doctrine is shaped by this, about how strategy is built to cotain the threat he possesses rather, that is focused on keeping him in check by targeting the troops around him, cutting him off from his escorts and isolate him to reduce his effectiveness. because he will just plow his way through whatever put in his way to stop him.

And Megatron... let's be clear, Megatron absolutely is the most powerful individual warrior their whole species has known for thousands of years, but at least a part of the effect on the Decepticon morale this has is that he's the only one capable of not just meeting, but actually stopping Optimus from advancing straight through their lines without much effort. Like, it's almost a tactical necessity to put Megatron right in Optimus' way, because that's the only way to bring one part of the Autobot assault to a halt, or else have Optimus tied up so that the Decepticon assault can go ahead.

I want more Optimus being feared by his enemies, because he has divine mandate to break the rules the game is played with.

Here's a thought: the Wreckers are a mobile commando unit

I don't expect them to be very well drilled in defensive strategies :)c

EDIT: Oh, today is pretty much the worst day to be thinking about this b/c I have such short access to a keyboard, but my point is -- the Wreckers get away with a relatively low amount of internal structure and get by on their high cohesion and team spirit, because they're always proactive. They are man-for-man the most effective unit when they're on the offensive, sure, but their effectiveness goes down dramatically when they're forced to defend and I'm not sure they've even considered what they'd do if they got ambushed.

But on the other hand, they can also sort of get away with that, because counter-Wrecker strategies are pretty low on the list of Decepticon priorities. At the peak of their effectiveness, the war is being fought on so many fronts and by such a strange assortment of units that the Wreckers are simply too small, mobile and unpredictable to waste resources countering.

If they show up, it's honestly more economic to take the L and make an example out of the failed commander, because that's a good way to build hostility and make your troops come up with their own counter-Wrecker strategies. After all, a big part of the Wrecker's effectiveness was just... the reputation, basically, and the effect on morale that had on both sides.