Vos

Vos belongs to the period before the Autobot-Decepticon war, when Cybertron's politics were city-state politics and the great powers were Iacon, Tarn and Vos. Vos is presented as the aerial power, which fits neatly with Starscream, who is identified as the figurehead of its ruling body in the years before its destruction. Its rivalry with Tarn was the sharpest on the planet, sharpened further by the energy shortages that were already squeezing every polity.

Its end is one of the bleakest pieces of G1 backstory. Tarn and Vos launched photon missiles at each other at the same moment, and both cities were wiped out simultaneously. Neither survived, neither won, and the mutual annihilation is usually presented as the event that broke the old political order and cleared the ground for the Great War proper. Starscream, having lost his city and his position, went to Megatron.

As with most of Cybertron's political geography, Vos is a comics and reference-book location rather than a cartoon one. It appears in Marvel's The Transformers Universe listings and in the broader G1 continuity family, and it is used heavily in later fiction as shorthand for the Seekers' origins. The cartoon has no Vos, no Tarn and no city-state war; it goes directly from a Quintesson slave factory to Autobots versus Decepticons.

• Vos and Tarn are one of the few G1 locations whose entire published history is a destruction: they exist in the fiction almost exclusively to have been destroyed.
• Starscream's association with Vos is the origin of the fan reading that the Seekers are an aristocratic aerial caste.
• The simultaneous-missile detail is a deliberate Cold War image, published in 1986 at the height of mutually assured destruction anxiety.
• Vos never appears in the G1 cartoon in any form.