Sandstorm (Prime)

The name or term "Sandstorm" refers to more than one character or idea. For a list of other meanings, see Sandstorm (disambiguation).

Sandstorm is a space pirate and later Autobot from the Aligned continuity family.

Sandstorm is a member of the Star Seekers crew.

Fiction

Sandstorm was a pilot on the pirate ship Tidal Wave commanded by Thundertron. Exiles

Sandstorm later piloted the Tidal Wave in combat against the Nemesis. They lost. Retribution

Following the restoration of Cybertron from the Great War, Sandstorm was one of the many Autobots blacklisted by the new High Council for being a supporter of Optimus Prime. Enemy of My Enemy

According to Rik Alvarez, the original concept of the Star Seekers had each of its 13 members hail from a different Cybertronian colony.^[1] Sandstorm was not described in any detail in the novels, so it's unknown which colony (if any) he was intended for; in the original Transformers cartoon, the Autobot Sandstorm was from the world of Paradron.
Thrilling 30 Sandstorm is based on a Nick Roche design intended for Prime Sandstorm! ^[2] Designer Joe Kyde was able to plan it as a retool of Springer, who was already in development.^[3]

↑ "Beast Hunters kind of came out of nowhere. We had a direction for season three. We knew where we were gonna go, we knew where we wanted it to end, and we had the concept for what the follow up show would be—and if you ever heard her a character called Thundertron, we were thinking: pirates! They go back to Cybertron and they're invaded by the pirates, and each of the pirates—there were 13 pirates and there were 13 colonies and each transformer was from a colony [...]"—Rik Alvarez, a TFCon Chicago 2018 panel clip
↑ "To clear up: I was working with Hasbro at the time, and designed Sandstorm while I was there. That was the base design, and then those crazy sods at Hasbro managed to pull my comic Springer out of it. In that order!"—Nick Roche, Twitter, 2022/11/29
↑ "Just checked. The first round of designs for Springer was around March 8-16, 2012. The first look at how to adapt the design into Sandstorm was April 25. By that time Springer's design was roughly blocked out. / My recollection is that the design drawing for the Sandstorm design was done for a separate development, and I liked it enough that I thought we could pull them both off with common tooling."—Joe Kyde, Discord, 2022/11/29