hotdogPi wrote: ↑March 1st, 2021, 9:10 pm
Wouldn't a breeder be destroyed by the first object it hits?
It's very unlikely. Given that a breeder expands quadraticly and its intermediate parts expand linearly, if a breeder and its progeny interact with another object, it's most likely that the interaction will be with the quadraticly expanding part, unlikely that will be with the linearly expanding part, and virtually zero that it will be with the breeder engine itself.
In the case of an MMM breeder hitting a block, the most likely scenario will be that one of the generated gliders will hit the block and turn into a messy soup, but the breeder engine and all of the puffers will be unaffected, and still tile the plane, with only a tiny irregularity where the collision occurred.
With an MMS breeder hitting a block, it would be one of the generated puffers that would be destroyed to form the soup, but just as in the previous example, the breeder would still tile the plane except for a tiny irregularity.
In the case of a slow breeder (e.g. one made of switch engines), it's possible that a glider or xWSS escaping from the soup will travel back and kill the engine, but again, with so many generated puffers, it's extremely unlikely that the breeder engine will even be in a convenient line to be hit. This is more likely in CAs that have common oblique spaceships, but it's still very unlikely.