The Axalon and its crew were originally part of an exploration initiative by the maximals before they got forcefully sidetracked, and Botanica and her crew were also a part of the same initiative. What were some of the other ships and crews like? What places did they go and what misadventures did they have?
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.
In addition to the Apex, which established an outpost on Regalis V, and the ill-fated Axalon, other notable starships include the Dianosk, which established colonies on worlds like Z’verei and Dykayra, the Lokana, whose crew adopted strange aerial plankton alternate modes to explore the swirling gas-scapes of Spindrift, the Tescuxa, who discovered Trypticon’s rusted remains on Praum, and the Choralob, the crew of which adopted beast modes to covertly study a primitive civilization of herbivorous reptiles on a distant world known only as Epsilon Sector, RG-21578-4.