The Nemesis

The Nemesis is the Ark's opposite number and considerably nastier: a colossal Decepticon warship whose primary weapon is a reactor-fed fusion cannon, backed by swarms of missiles, a tractor beam that pulls targets up into rotating blades and drills, and magnetic couplings with a heated boarding chute designed to cut through hull plating as thick as the Ark's. It is built for one job, taking other ships apart while its crew walks aboard.

In the G1 cartoon the Nemesis pursues the Ark out of Cybertron, and Megatron's entire boarding party crosses over. Both ships end up crashing on prehistoric Earth. Before impact several objects are ejected, including an escape pod that turns up in A Plague of Insecticons and the object that becomes the Pearl of Bahoudin in Trans-Europe Express. The wreck lies undisturbed until 1985, when human archaeologists in South America dig it up in Microbots. Megatron extracts the ship's power source, the Heart of Cybertron, has Hook install it in his own body, and becomes briefly close to unstoppable until Perceptor, Brawn and Bumblebee remove and destroy it from inside him.

Like the Ark, the ship is unnamed in both the cartoon and the Marvel comics. Beast Wars named it in 1998, in an episode that has the Predacon Megatron raise it from the ocean floor and use it against the Ark, closing a four-million-year loop. Its tactical weakness, all command and fire control in an exposed dorsal conning tower, is what kills it there: Rhinox flies a shuttle straight into the bridge.

• The Nemesis is never named in the G1 cartoon or the Marvel comics. The name was coined for Beast Wars, twelve years later.
• Marvel and Marvel UK contradict each other on the ship's fate: the UK story has Galvatron destroy it in orbit in 1986, while the US letters page says Shockwave parked it on the ocean floor. Simon Furman wrote both stories.
• Microbots establishes that the Nemesis's star drive contains a Cybertronian alloy called Cybertroid alloy.
• Dreamwave's technical specifications give the ship a length of 2.5 miles, a wingspan of 1.75 miles and a height of 1.25 miles.
• The Nemesis had to fly in the Ark's wake during a meteor shower because maintaining its shields drained too much power, a direct consequence of Cybertron's energy crisis.