I6_I6 wrote: ↑December 23rd, 2025, 10:26 am
The only problem is the burning at the front, but that can likely also be made adjustable. This might open up a whole new category of engineered spaceships!
It's not
entirely new: stable objects moved by passing xWSS convoys... are how the (also highly adjustable) Caterloopillar spaceships work.
Oblique Caterloopillars
have been discussed, but they haven't been seen until now! Though I'm not sure it's really appropriate to call this a "Caterloopillar", even though it shares the basic idea of a spine made of xWSS convoys. The "loop" part of "Caterloopillar" refers to the "strange loop" design reminiscent of M.C. Escher's
_Drawing Hands_ -- xWSS convoy #1 uses appropriately placed still lifes to generate slow salvos that build xWSS convoy #2 traveling the opposite direction, which then uses a similar trick to make slow salvos that construct convoy #1.
That's not exactly what's happening here -- there's only one xWSS-convoy spine, traveling upwards. The xWSSes are built with colliding gliders. along similar lines as the helix construction in the original
Caterpillar, rather than with slow salvos.

- zoomed-out view of (28,7)c_448_spaceship
- (28,7)c_448_spaceship.png (5.93 KiB) Viewed 3909 times
The small top part can be thought of as "
mechanism to cleanly stop the xWSS convoys". The bottom section is "
mechanism to build the xWSS convoys". Most of the left side, including the narrow bottleneck between the two parts, is the completed xWSS-convoy spine.
I haven't looked closely at the xWSS convoys themselves. I'm vaguely guessing that it might be only part of the convoy that is designed to move a block by (7,-28) while releasing a glider -- where a few other additional xWSSes are included to make the cleanup easier at the front end. That again would be similar to the Caterloopillar design, if it's true. Maybe someone can sort that out and confirm or deny?
EDIT: Doesn't look like there are any extra xWSSes to help with cleanup. All nine of the xWSSes seem to be placed appropriately to contribute to the block-moving reaction. I could still easily be wrong, though.
simsim314's design for the Caterloopillar convoy cleanup deliberately added extra xWSSes to make each salvo more or less "self-suppressing". All that was needed was a small constellation in the right place to trigger the complete destruction of the whole convoy -- like the honeyfarm at the left in
this illustration, though that wasn't the final form that made it into the Caterloopillars. In this new ship, the "cleanup" section at the front has to be relatively large, but that means that fewer xWSSes have to be constructed and the "construction" section can be smaller.