Artillery Drone

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

Artillery Drones are sparkless duplicates of Strika, essentially a mass of troops that she controls. They replaced the Tank Drones towards the end of the battle for Cybertron, following the instatement of Strika and Obsidian as new Vehicon Generals.

Fiction

Beast Machines cartoon

Obsidian and Strika's first mission on being brought online involved luring the Maximals into a trap. They were able to lure the six Maximals to an area of Cybertropolis and surround them with Artillery and Copter Drones. Eventually the foe was forced to the Council Citadel, and Artillery Drones pursued them inside. It might have ended there, but the interference of the newest Maximal, Botanica, caused the destruction of the drones and the escape of the rest of the Maximals. The Strike The new drones were put to work patrolling the city in search of the Maximals. A trio of them were accompanying Strika when she found Rattrap and Botanica, but all three were quickly destroyed. The Search

While the two generals were coordinating troop movements, Savage creature gave away the position of a small team of Maximals. The Artillery and Copter Drones immediately attacked, but the Maximals were able to destroy a fair few of them before being forced underground. As part of a distraction, Cheetor, Silverbolt and Nightscream later attacked a platoon of Artillery Drones, causing major damage before leading the drone forces on a wild goose chase, while the rest of the Maximals infiltrated the Grand Mal. The Siege

Following Megatron's apparent demise, Strika retained control of her drones. A group of them were destroyed by a reanimated Aero Drone as it opened fire on the two generals after they decided to join the Maximals. Megatron, as it turned out, wasn't as dead as it had appeared, and when he came back on the scene, the two generals and their drones rejoined him. Spark of Darkness

The drones resumed patrolling the city, and production stepped up because Megatron intended to assault the Grand Mal, which the Maximals were occupying. As the combined forces moved into position, a Maximal team caused more chaos on the ground. The drones began the assault anyway, bombarding the ship's shields, until a clue found by Megatron enabled them to modulate their fire to pass through the shields and bring down the ship. The Downward Spiral The drones initiated field repairs before the final attack, giving the Maximals time to get the shield back up, but it was soon brought down again, and the combined drone army engaged the Maximals in combat. Presumably the Artillery Drones were all deactivated when Strika was shot into space by Cheetor. When Legends Fall

Beast Wars: Uprising

During the Vehicon Apocalypse, when Galva Convoy turned on the Builder Assembly, he had his Vehicons assimilate them. All but one of them were promptly turned into artillery drones, the exception being the smaller Ratbat. Soon after, the Vehicons began assimilating more Macromaster-scale Cybertronians, creating more artillery drones. Derailment

Games

Transformers Roleplaying Game

Artillery Drones were fast, heavily-armed attack platforms, which usually operated in conjunction with Copter Drones. Technorganic Secrets

Notes

Name

The Artillery Drones were never named in the Beast Machines cartoon, toyline, or related media. Behind-the-scenes of the cartoon, they were referred to by the production staff as just "Strika-Drones".^[1] We of TFWiki must confess that the name "Artillery Drone" has its origins in, well, this Wiki.

In our early days (before the move from Wikia), there were several fan-coined names seeing use on various articles of this Wiki to refer to these drones in lieu of a known official name; such examples were "Ground Drones", "Striker Drones", "All-Terrain Drones", "Heavy Artillery Drones", etc. Of those examples, the name "Heavy Artillery Drone" is what this Wiki had previously used as the title of this article, with the name having been chosen by the anonymous user who originally created the article. As the name "Heavy Artillery Drone" had no canonical origin, it is very likely to have derived from the opening paragraph of Strika's article that describes her as "taking the place of Tankor as commander of heavy artillery."

From the time that this article was first created, the name "Heavy Artillery Drone" had remained untouched for a little over a decade, due to an unintended oversight and lack of fact-checking on this Wiki's part, which had remained in effect for all that time. As this Wiki is usually quite diligent in its adherence to official terminology, and not in the habit of making things up, it was assumed during all that time that the name "Heavy Artillery Drone" had to have come from somewhere official, even an obscure source. Simply put, no one was aware that the name wasn't official during all that time.

Near the end of 2016, the name "artillery drone" (in all lowercase) first appeared in the Beast Wars: Uprising prose story "Derailment" as a shortened form of the name that this article had been using since its onset, as was confirmed by one of the story's authors (who also admitted to having floated "assault drones" as an alternative naming option).^[2] So now these drones finally have an official, in-fiction name thanks in part to this Wiki's little slip-up. Yay?

References