Engineering spaceships from push reactions w/ glider output

[drc]

It'd be nice to see arbitrarily slow push reactions getting some love. For example, this one in B37/S2-i34qy:

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x = 139, y = 78, rule = B37/S2-i34qy
114bobo$50b2o13b2o13b2o13b2o13b2obo2bo$50b2o13b2o13b2o13b2o13b2o2bobo
18$114bobo$2b2o25b2o25b2o25b2o25b2obo2bo$2b2o25b2o25b2o25b2o25b2o2bobo
4$138bo$137b2o$138bo18$138bo$137b2o$138bo4$2b2o25b2o25b2o25b2o25b2o2bo
bo$2b2o25b2o25b2o25b2o25b2obo2bo$114bobo15$112bobo$2o25b2o25b2o25b2o
25b2obo2bo$2o25b2o25b2o25b2o25b2o2bobo4$136bo$135b2o$136bo!

There's a c/2 spaceship if that helps the frontend get synthesized. I'll fully admit I have no idea how most of this works:

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x = 5, y = 7, rule = B37/S2-i34qy
2bobo$bo2bo$2o$o$2o$bo2bo$2bobo!

There's also this probably useless reaction:

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x = 12, y = 7, rule = B37/S2-i34qy
9bobo$8bo2bo$bo5b2o$2o5bo$bo5b2o$8bo2bo$9bobo!

[muzik]

Would the speed on such a ship vary because of the arbitrary spacing?

[drc]

Would the speed on such a ship vary because of the arbitrary spacing?

Affirmative. Although I don't think it could be easily extensible without a script of some sort.

[dvgrn]

That reaction certainly has some potential as the basis for an adjustable-speed self-supporting spaceship -- either an orthogonal one similar to the Centipede, or possibly an oblique one along the lines of the half-baked knightships.

For the knightship case, think of the blocks as standing in for the half-bakeries in long chains that create the recipes that produce the next synchronized signal that travels down the line of blocks.

Over-Unity (Sideways)
In either case, the first thing that's needed is an "over-unity" reaction. There's one in the example, but it fires spaceships backward, always on the same lane, which is hard to use unless a whole new single-channel technology can be developed for this rule (and even then I don't quite see how it would work).

The spark that makes those backward spaceships has a nice amount of clearance to the side, though, and it isn't involved with rebuilding the block. With any luck at all an exhaustive enumeration will turn up some kind of signal escaping sideways, and then there'd be a chance of making progress.

I could be totally missing a much better design based on unique features of this rule, though. This is just me trying to apply existing designs to a new problem, and that may not be a good idea.

Basic Research
Of course, this isn't B3/S23 Life where we have forty-five years of research to build on. So for a Centipede-like design, it would be necessary to show that

1) slow salvos of whatever-the-sideways-signal-is are universal in this rule, or can at least build useful things,
2) some number N of block trails can be adjusted to produce arbitrary slow salvos,
3) slow salvos can edge-shoot forward spaceships that travel faster than the climbers on the block trails.
4) the forward spaceships can be arranged into a helix that can be burned to produce the N new blocks at the front end of the chains.

#3 looks pretty likely, except I don't know about the edge-shooting part. The same spaceships that activate the block chains can be used in the helices, because the ones in the block trails get slowed down significantly by the climbing reaction. But #s 1, 2, and 4 all need a whole lot of basic research... and I don't think all the tools that do equivalent research in Conway's Life were written with isotropic rules in mind.

Out there somewhere I bet there is a solution, though!

[toroidalet]

I was working on a helix for this design, and here are my best results (they're very dirty and expensive)

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x = 25, y = 65, rule = B37/S2-i34qy
9b3o$9b3o$10bo$b2o12bo$obo11b3o$2bo4$15bo$14b3o14$15bo$14b3o16$12bo$
11b3o7$20bo$19b3o13$23bo$22b3o!

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x = 27, y = 75, rule = B37/S2-i34qy
9b3o$9b3o$10bo$b2o12bo$obo11b3o$2bo4$15bo$14b3o14$15bo$14b3o16$12bo$
11b3o7$20bo$19b3o15$25bo$24bobo2$24b3o4$22b3o$23bo$23bo!

(I don't think a depth-first search was a good idea.)