Star Drive

This article is about the main-universe Star Drive - for alt-U counterpart, see Stardrive.

Stardrive is a Camien Space Knight.

Look! Up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! It's...

Star Drive knows that she's not like her fellow members of the Solstar Order. Orphaned as a protoform after her ship ran afoul of the Galactic Council, she was rescued by Rom and raised in isolation from the rest of her species, growing up among the myriad organics under the protection of the Order. Eventually, Star Drive rose to become one of the many Space Knights of the Solstar Order, dedicating the rest of her life to battling the malicious Dire Wraiths that plague the galaxy.

But although she's a competent, dedicated warrior, Star Drive struggles under the burden of her Cybertronian heritage in a civilization of carbon-based lifeforms. Having grown up hearing the horror stories of the Cybertronian Great War, Star Drive is aware just why her comrades are prone to view her with such mistrust. Should the destructive Autobot/Decepticon war reach Solstar shores, Stardrive will have to decide where her true loyalties lie...

“	I'm only alive because Rom gave me a chance. I became a knight to give everybody one.	”
—Star Drive, Shining Armor #1

Fiction

2005 IDW continuity

Doomed planet. Desperate scientists. Last hope. Kindly couple.

In the mid-19th century, a Camien vessel containing a cargo of protoforms attracted the attention of a Galactic Council warship; misidentifying the vessel as a Cybertronian ship, they pursued and shot it down in the Gray Area between Council space and the neighboring Solstar Order. The altercation caught the attention of the Space Knight Rom, who investigated the crash site and discovered that all but one of the protoforms had perished. Rom rescued the survivor and brought it to his home planet of Elonia. There, scientists managed to stabilize the injured "Gray Area Anomaly," and created an energon synthesizer, reverse engineered from energon samples recovered at the crash site, to nourish it.

Star Drive - Elonian Space Fighter and Speeder modes

The protoform soon developed into a healthy young female Transformer; she was raised alongside other alien youngsters and soon discovered her ability to transform into a car Shining Armor #1 and space fighter, Shining Armor #2 from which her classmates nicknamed her "Star Drive." Raised in isolation from her species, Star Drive learned about the destructive legacy of the Cybertronians in her school, with teachers suggesting that with the "proper upbringing," she could do better than the rest of her species. Shining Armor #1

Star Drive - the Wraith within

On a graduation field trip to Mato Grosso, Star Drive was attacked by the Dire Wraith Vekktral, who tried to assimilate her. Shining Armor #1 Shining Armor #2 She was saved by Rom and a group of Space Knights, and the experience convinced her to join the Space Knights to emulate her hero Rom, and after graduating from the Space Knight's academy, she was bonded to a suit of crystalline armor and granted a pair of Neutralizers.

Notes

"I'm just a baby. Baby baby baby. I'm a baby! I'm zero years old!"

• Having developed from a "forged" protoform into a naturally female Transformer, Stardrive and her ship could not have been from Cybertron in the timeframe of the story. Her world of origin is never actually revealed in the comic itself, only fleetingly referred to as a "Cybertronian colony" in the prologue, but sharp-eyed readers will note that Stardrive's energon is bright blue rather than purple —- an evolutionary trait shared by all Transformers born on Caminus, and first alluded to in the Titans Return one-shot comic.

• Barber pitched the idea of a Cybertronian who was raised in isolation from their species.

• While not the first female Transformer to have more than one alternate mode, Stardrive is the first female to be explicitly labeled as a Triple Changer.