Cogless

I'm literally neurodivergent and a miner.

Born in the wake of the Quintesson war, Cogless Transformers are a caste of manual laborers who occupy the bottom-most rung of the Cybertronian hierarchy. Although smaller and weaker than other Cybertronians, their work in the planet's subterannean layers—most prominently the miners who physically extract energon from Cybertron's crust—is vital to the continued existence of Cybertronian society. True to their name, they lack the transformation cogs innate to other members of the species, and as a result don't possess alternate modes or the ability to access their built-in weapons.

Fiction

One film

Cogless Transformers were created at some point after Sentinel Prime took office after he allied with the Quintessons, deposed the Primes and lost the Matrix of Leadership. Without free access to energon, Sentinel began removing the transformation cogs from newborn Transformers and press-ganged them into a life of manual labor, and successfully convinced the citizens of Cybertron into believing that they had simply been born without transformation cogs. Over the next fifty cycles, Cogless laborers came to fill many low-ranking positions in Cybertronian society such as sanitation work, but the most important job of all was mining whatever usable veins of energon remained from the Cybertronian strata: under Sentinel Prime's leadership, most of that energon was funneled away to appease his Quintesson masters, leaving little for the people of Cybertron. Despite the long hours and extremely dangerous working conditions, miners received little respect from the other citizens of Iacon. When not mining energon, miners lived together in a large communal barracks.

When a small group of cogless Transformers—Orion Pax, D-16, Elita-1, and B-127—discovered Alpha Trion in the grave of the Primes, Trion revealed that the circumstances of their birth were a lie, and that Sentinel had actually removed their transformation cogs before they came online. However, Trion also bequeathed them four of the original transformation cogs from the Primes, which caused them to spontaneously grow into stronger forms capable of transformation.

During the subsequent battle to overthrow Sentinel Prime, Orion roused many of his former cogless comrades to action, who battled Sentinel Prime's Trackers using their jet packs and mining equipment. After Orion Pax—now Optimus Prime—received the Matrix of Leadership, the cogless 'bots all received transformation cogs of their own; the caste was presumably abolished in favor of the newly autonomous "Autobots". One

Notes

Minin' away/I don't know what to mine/I'll mine this anyway

• Many of the Cogless generics have color schemes that evoke existing Transformers characters: a yellow, black and red Jazz resembles Jackpot, an orange and purple Moonracer resembles Lancer, a recolor of "Not Chromia" seems to be based on Greenlight, a different Not Chromia could be Lug, a blue Sideswipe looks like War for Cybertron Trilogy Deep Cover, an orange and pink Arcee resembles her cancelled prototype from the original toyline and a white-and-blue Brawn seems intended to evoke Twin Twist. A purple-crested, gold-faced Prowl can also be seen in the crowd during Orion's big speech. Since none of these characters have been officially named (and they all appear multiple times across the same scenes, though the same is also true of most of the named Cogless), we're considering these to be homages rather than actual appearances of these characters.

See also

• Monoformer