Trypticon (WFC)
| The name or term "Trypticon" refers to more than one character or idea. For a list of other meanings, see Trypticon (disambiguation). |
| The name or term "Nemesis" refers to more than one character or idea. For a list of other meanings, see Nemesis (disambiguation). |
- Trypticon is an orbital space station in Decepticon hands from the Transformers: Prime continuity family.
Serving as a waypoint between the bases on Cybertron's moons, Trypticon Station was apparently named for the distant Trypticon Asteroid Belt. It was entrusted to the care of the Seekers long ago, to protect a powerful secret hidden within. When Starscream, commander of the Seekers went over to Megatron early in the war, the station, which he commanded, went with him.
Trypticon is more than just a station, though. He was recreated as a fully sentient, living Transformer (though how and when are up to debate, see note below) and, eventually, a powerful Decepticon.
Fiction
Exodus: The Official History of the War for Cybertron
Prior to the war, Trypticon Station was used for research that could not be conducted planetside, including the first forays into sequestering the Dark Energon that had resulted from Unicron's attack on the planet. Its security was seen to by the Seeker caste, which allowed Air Commander Starscream knowledge of its secrets. As a result, he ordered his forces to occupy it after the capture of Sentinel Zeta Prime, as a bargaining chip in negotiations with Megatron and his growing Decepticon army.
During one of Starscream's absences, Megatron decided he tired of negotiations and took Trypticon Station by force. Upon Starscream's return to the station, Megatron pressed the Seeker and ultimately gained access to the facility's research on Dark Energon. However, as the supplies of the substance from the initial harvest were slender, he required the means to transfer large quantities of energon to the station so that they could be converted into the rarer resource. As Trypticon Station was configured to receive fuel from the Geosynchronous Energon Bridge in Crystal City, the Decepticons were able to transfer an initial supply, but not nearly enough for the ravenous rate at which they were consuming Dark Energon. This was eventually remedied by Megatron's capture of the Plasma Energy Chamber, which provided a nearly unlimited source of fuel directly from Cybertron's core.
After a team led by Optimus Prime ventured into the planet's core to cut off the transfer, Megatron decided to switch tactics. He allowed Shockwave to apply the experimental knowledge he had gleaned over the course of the war, and Trypticon was granted life and sentience, including the ability to shape its corridors into a dizzying array of defense drones and Minicons.
Ultimately, a team of Autobots aboard the Eight Track found a gap in the station's external defenses and managed to venture within and knock the behemoth from orbit. Victory was brief, however, as Trypticon revealed a robot form and crawled from the wreckage planetside. Though initially the Wreckers and Omega Supreme were tasked with keeping the gargantuan Decepticon away from the Ark launch, this proved to be in vain, as Megatron boarded Trypticon along with a hand-picked crew of the Decepticon elite. Transforming into a Nemesis-class battleship, Trypticon pursued the Ark to, and subsequently through, the last remaining functional space bridge in Cybertronian orbit. As the Ark emerged in unknown space, the Nemesis was nowhere within sensor range. Exodus
Games
Transformers: War for Cybertron (Xbox 360/PS3/PC)
- Voice actor: Fred Tatasciore (English)
After Optimus Prime learned of the coming Great Shutdown, he ordered an evacuation of all Autobots. When Megatron started using his space station to blow up the ships, Optimus sent Jetfire, Air Raid, and Silverbolt to destroy the station. Flooding it with coolant while under heavy fire, the jets were about to blow it up...until they discovered that the station itself was alive. At this point, the Trypticon orbital weapon gun began first targeting locations on Cybertron such as Zeta Prime's Vaults, the Hall of Ancients, the Stellar Galleries and the Code Archives before finally acquiring the coordinates for Optimus Prime. The fliers hoped that they could prevent Iacon's destruction by destroying Trypticon's conversion cog, reverting him to his robot mode.
Unfortunately for the aerial Autobots, his robot mode was a gigantic metal dinosaur. Jetfire destroyed his jetpack, and Trypticon plummeted to the planet below. Optimus, Ironhide, and Bumblebee went to investigate the crash and battled the titan, destroying his shoulder-mounted weapons systems by overloading them with energon batteries. The Autobots proceeded to shoot his exposed heat vents and to destroy a set of three power cores along his shoulders and back. After suffering heavy damage, Trypticon lost his balance and fell into an energon lake below. Transformers: War for Cybertron
Transformers: War for Cybertron (DS)
Transformers: War for Cybertron
Notes
- As with Starscream, Trypticon seems to have two contradictory "origins" within Exodus itself. Early in the novel, Orion Pax researches the station and discovers that it was secretly "recreated" from a simple space station into a full Transformer and was raised to sentience, given a living spark (pg. 82) when Dark Energon was hidden aboard by an "ancient" iteration of the High Council headed by Sentinel Prime. Later in the novel, the Decepticons seize the station, and Shockwave is credited with then transforming it from a simple station to a Transformer and using multiple captive sparks to bring it to life.
