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Here, a glider triggers a stable, clean fuse which burns at the speed of light, and outputs another glider. The output glider could easily be duplicated, and some of the duplicates could repair the wire. The downside is that, because the entire wire must be rebuilt, the cooldown time is even worse than for calcyman's stable orthogonal lightspeed wire. On top of that, calcyman's wire can be extended without increasing the cooldown time, while this fuse cannot. However, the fuse can at least in theory be synthesized using known reactions, so given sufficient time between signals, it IS possible to transport a glider diagonally at the speed of light, and it is possible to synthesize the device.

By the way, is there a known synthesis for the 2c3 diagonal wire? I know it is easy to convert a glider into a 2c3 signal, and vice versa, but can the actual wire be synthesized?

137ben wrote:Here, a glider triggers a stable, clean fuse which burns at the speed of light, and outputs another glider.

In Golly's current pattern collection, Patterns/Life/Spaceships/adjustable-Corder-lineship.rle shows a similar lightspeed fuse. It isn't set up to produce an output glider, but it certainly could be, and it does show a possible c/12 mechanism to rebuild the fuse. No doubt a gun and eater could be developed for that set of Corderrakes and escort ships -- they're all technically glider-constructible.

Patterns/Life/Miscellaneous/lightspeed.rle shows a more direct mechanism for carrying a lightspeed signal; a gun that produces those glider waves is also technically possible, just ridiculously large and slow for diagonal lightspeed transmissions over any distance.

137ben wrote:By the way, is there a known synthesis for the 2c3 diagonal wire? I know it is easy to convert a glider into a 2c3 signal, and vice versa, but can the actual wire be synthesized?

No synthesis is known, I believe. I wouldn't be surprised if there's an incremental synthesis out there somewhere, converting a stabilizing bookend to the next 32-cell chunk of wire at each step. But it will have to be a pretty tricky reaction -- it's hard to pause construction to let the next wave of gliders move into position when you have to keep the growing string of inductors continuously damped down.

It might be possible to find a more constructible inductor stack with the same central core. But there just isn't a lot of demand for constructible high-speed signal-carrying technology... I guess any sentient Conway's Life creatures who might otherwise be in the market for a fast land-line phone system are either reasonably patient, or they'd rather not have their universe cluttered up with permanent, dangerously explosive wiring. Wireless glider salvos may be a bit slower, but they're a lot simpler -- and the bandwidth is much better, too.