Darksyde (BW)

The Darksyde is a spaceship in the Beast Wars portion of the Generation 1 continuity family.

Welcome to the Darksyde. Your hostess will be serving you a choice of beverages and honey-roasted nuts.

The Darksyde (sometimes Darkside) is the name of the Predacon vessel that Megatron's troops "borrowed" to get to Earth after he stole the Golden Disk. Terrorsaur named her, though Waspinator wanted to call her the "Buzzerbot". Later Predacon Inferno preferred to call the ship "the Colony".

Japanese name: Terra Crusher (or something to that effect; see Trivia)

Fiction

Animated continuity

Beast Wars

Note the space dart board behind it

Exiting Transwarp, the Darksyde was immediately fired upon by the pursuing Maximal science vessel Axalon. Despite the urging of his first officer to destroy the Axalon when the Maximal's shields failed, Megatron arrogantly decided to merely toy with his opponents by slowing down the ship enough for the Axalon to catch up, then unleashing a broadside from the Darksyde's side guns, severely damaging the Maximal ship.

However, Megatron would not have long to gloat, as several well-aimed plasma cannon shots from the Axalon strafed the hull of the Darksyde, crippling the ship. Soon afterwards, both ships crash-landed on the planet's surface. Beast Wars, Part 1

After being shot down by the Axalon, the Predacon ship became the Predacons' base of operations on Earth, commonly referred to as the Predacon Base. The Darksyde apparently crashed in a volcanically-active area, as the impact created lava-filled concentric cracks around it, and an upwelling of lava in the main control center. While it's arguably dangerous to have a control room where you can't walk across the floor without melting, it does look seriously badass.

How electrifying!

Beaten on, raided by Maximals for transwarp drive components, and heavily damaged several times during the conflict, the vessel was finally destroyed by the Vok emissary Tigerhawk.

(Note: In the Japanese dub, the Darksyde's computer AI was named Navico.)

Crew

"Terra Crasher"

The original crew of the Darkside included:

• Megatron - Captain/Commander
• Dinobot - Second-in-command.
• Scorponok - Engineer, later second-in-command after Dinobot turned on Megatron.
• Tarantulas - Weapons/Special Ops. Secretly a spy for the Tripredacus Council.
• Terrorsaur - Fighter
• Waspinator - Pilot

Trivia

• The name of the Predacon ship comes from fandom interpretation of Terrorsaur's line from the Beast Wars episode "Equal Measures," which welcomes Cheetor "to the dark side." The name was used in the Transformers Beast Wars: Transmetals video game, making the name official, and again years later in the booklet inside Kid Rhino's Beast Wars season 1 DVD set. In the BotCon 2006 exclusive toy box set and accompanying story, "Darksyde" was spelled with a "y" to avoid possible trademark problems.

• In the Japanese dub of Beast Wars, the Predacon ship was given an official name long before "Darksyde" was canonized in the West. Unfortunately, the Japanese name of the ship is rendered so nebulous by alternately acceptable transliterations that it's impossible to tell what they were actually going for in English. The katakana for the ship's name - テラクラッシャー te-ra-ku-ra-sshā - can reasonably be read as "Terra Crasher", "Terror Crasher", "Terror Crusher" or "Terra Crusher". Given the sense of humor forcefully injected into the Japanese dub of Beast Wars, it's possible they wanted "Terra Crasher" because the ship literally smacks into the Earth, but that admittedly doesn't make a lot of sense in-context. So who knows.

Toys

Beast Wars Tenth Anniversary

• Megatron (2006)

A small toy of the Darksyde was included with the Beast Wars Tenth Anniversary version of Megatron. The packaging calls it the Preadacon Predacon ship, possibly due to trademark issues.

From Teletraan I: The Transformers Wiki, a Wikia wiki.