danny wrote:As you can see, the orthogonal spaceship interacts with a still life to displace it by (1,3), and survives unscathed while producing a diagonal spaceship backwards.
Is there anything missing? Should I rub the sparks together to produce an extra glider?
Nice potential camelship engine! But, yeah, there's still quite a lot missing.
1) If you look at the two sides of an HBK, you'll see that they're firing gliders in opposite directions. All the NW-traveling gliders in the world won't do you any good, unless they have something to bounce off of. And whatever that something is, it also has to move northeast at (1,-3) [Golly coordinate system].
So, yes, above your current line you might want to have a couple more rows of Weird Loaf Things With Eyes (WELOTHWEYs) being passed by Weird Sparky Line Things, and the sparks from those would have to be able to produce SE gliders.
2) You probably have to be able to produce NW and SE gliders with different timings to achieve Universal Construction Power. Unfortunately your Weird Sparky Line Things are 12c/28, so you can only place or not place a WELOTHWEY every 12 cells along -- there's no fine adjustability, like (1,1) with a half-bakery.
3) Once you have your NW and SE gliders, you have to collide them and produce... something. By rough analogy with the HBK, you'd probably want to make west-traveling Weird Sparky Line Things, which would head back to where the east-traveling WESPLITs are coming from.
4) The west-traveling WESPLITs will have to, maybe, crash into Unknown Something so as to slow-WESPLIT-contruct the right number of synchronized east-traveling WESPLITs at a (1, -3) offset, plus Unknown Something at the same (1,-3) offset, to start the whole cycle over again.
5) Way off in the east, the east-traveling WESPLITs probably have to crash into a Completely Different Unknown Something and get stopped cleanly.... except leaving the same Completely Different Unknown Something at a (1,-3) offset. Maybe some gliders generated down at the east end can take care of that, but it's not trivial.
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It doesn't seem to me as if all of the above problems are solvable in any reasonable amount of time. Which just means that you probably shouldn't try to work by analogy to a half-baked knightship as much as I just did.
You'd have to find the strengths of this new rule and come up with an "over-unity" mechanism unique to WESPLITs and WELOTHWEYs -- figure out where and how you can send arbitrary numbers of gliders to crash into a target, with enough variation in lane and/or timing that you can get universal construction going.
It might well end up looking a lot more like a Caterloopillar than like an HBK -- but with an oblique direction of travel, it would be a Cameloopillar. That's likely to be a good bit trickier to work with than the orthogonal version, for some of the same reasons that the waterbear is so much more of a headache (and more impressive) than the shield bug and centipede.