The Ark

The Ark is a Vanguard-class Deep Space Interceptor: five decks, a full complement of three hundred, five hyperfuel intake accelerators, sixteen particle-combustion cannons to port, sixteen laser emitters to starboard, a primary starfield missile launcher and an Overshock sonic battery. It is fully automated and self-sufficient, and it can be flown by a handful of crew if it has to be. Optimus Prime launched it from an energy-starved Cybertron with the Autobots' best aboard, and Megatron's elite followed in the Nemesis.

The crash is the founding event of the entire franchise. In More Than Meets the Eye, Part 1 the Ark strikes two colliding asteroids, the Nemesis catches it, Megatron's boarding party fights its way in, and the crippled ship goes down into a volcano on prehistoric Earth. Everyone aboard, both factions, falls into stasis. Four million years later the volcano erupts, the ship's damaged systems come back online, and Teletraan I scans passing Earth vehicles and rebuilds every Transformer aboard into a car, a jet or a gun. The Decepticons wake first and leave. The Autobots stay in the wreck, and it becomes Autobot Headquarters.

The ship never flies again in the cartoon. It sits in the mountain as a base for two seasons and into 2005, gradually supplanted by Autobot City, and it is finally destroyed in Five Faces of Darkness, Part 5 when Trypticon blasts the entire mountain to rubble after Warpath's defenders and Teletraan I's automated cannons fail to stop him. The show never once calls it the Ark; that name comes from the comics and was adopted by fans, then made official by Beast Wars a decade later.

• The Ark is never named in the G1 cartoon. Fans borrowed the name from the Marvel comic, and it was not spoken on screen until Beast Wars in 1996.
• The cartoon Ark is a rounded golden-yellow ovoid with Teletraan I as its computer; the Marvel Ark is squared-off metallic silver with a computer called Auntie.
• The name is generally taken from Noah's Ark, a vessel carrying a species through a catastrophe to survive on the other side.
• Beast Wars' redesign of the Ark drew on the U.S.S. Defiant from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and Optimus Primal notes the ship used die-cast construction, a lost art by his era.
• The first ever Ark toy was a 3-inch Titanium die-cast whose rear two-thirds were lifted from Milton Bradley's 1978 Electronic Star Bird, and whose packaging text described the Marvel version's destruction while depicting the cartoon version.