Cycle Drone

Motorcycle Drones are Vehicons from the Beast Machines portion of the Generation 1 continuity family.

Motorcycle Drones (also known as Cycle Drones) are the spearhead of Megatron's Vehicon forces. These deadly sparkless drones chase down fugitive Maximals with their astonishing speed and maneuverability, and finish them off with their lethal pulse weapons. While their computerized brains are simple, their general Thrust leads them quite ably. A Cycle Drone's main strength is in numbers; swarming around their targets and confusing them with pulse fire. They use this advantage well, always travelling in large phalanaxes across Cybertron.

Fiction

Beast Machines cartoon

Voice actor: N/A (English), Nobutoshi Canna, Isshin Chiba, Yūichi Nagashima, Mitsuo Iwata (Japanese)

Motorcycle Drones were used by Megatron in his conquest of Cybertron.

The Motorcycle Drones were the second type of Vehicons encountered by Optimus Primal's Maximals. Immediately after the Maximals had been reformatted into new technorganic forms, Motorcycle Drones stormed the Oracle chamber. Unable to transform, the Maximals were forced to flee. The Maximals managed to evade the drones for a time by dodging them as they came up upon a crevice, forcing the drones to overshoot them and double-back. Upon their return, the cycle drones' forces were diminished, as half of them were forced to stay behind and use their bodies as ramps, to enable the other half to jump the gorge and engage the Maximals once more. The drones then split up to track down the Maximals. While each of the Maximals took out one drone each, the remaining ones took on Optimus Primal and managed to force him off the cliff edge. Optimus scrapped these as well when he managed to transform, and used his new body's power offensive capabilities against them. Afterwards, only two drones remained. Optimus attempted to interrogate them, but they remained silent, until they struggled free of his grasp and drove away. The Reformatting

The drones were granted a leader shortly thereafter when Megatron bestowed Waspinator's spark upon a Motorcycle Drone, creating Thrust. Thrust and his drones continued to bedevil the Maximals, most notably when a group of Motorcycle Drones equipped with spark extractors felled all of the Maximals save for Primal immediately prior to Cybertron's reformatting.

The drones were sometimes depicted as the same size as Thrust, and sometimes significantly shorter.

Toys

Beast Machines

• Motorcycle Drone (Basic, 2001)

The Motorcycle Drone was released in the last wave of the Beast Machines toyline, as part of the Battle for the Spark subline. It transforms into a maroon and silver Cybertronic motorcycle, and although its instructions give it a two-legged robot mode with "feet", it can also be left partially untransformed to more closely resemble the show depiction. It features a missile launcher in the left tailpipe/right arm, activated by pressing on the spark crystal. It hews more closely to the animation model than the Thrust toy released the year before, which may be why it was redecoed as Thrust for release in the Japanese Beast Wars Returns line several years later.

• More information on Motorcycle Drone at TFU.info

Notes

• In the Japanese dub of the series, the cycle drones would express their mindless nature by constantly chanting "Always work hard, work hard!" (ばりばりばりばりよろしく! Baribari-baribari yoroshiku!) for every second they were on screen. This became so irritating that even the characters within the show would comment on how obnoxious it was.

Foreign names

• Japanese: Motorcycle Drone (モーターサイクルドローン Mōtāsaikuru Dorōn)