31c/240 caterpillar working notes

[Resu]

a narrow-track silverfish just for fun

mini silverfish.rle
Beacuse it doesn't affect the width, just for fun i used only the most basic rakes, also just for fun as many backrakes as possible. Beacuse of that it only has a 10% smaller popultion than the regular silverfish
I wonder which 31c/240 spaceship is the easiest to build a gun for

What about an eater?

[WhiteHawk]

a narrow-track silverfish just for fun

mini silverfish.rle
Beacuse it doesn't affect the width, just for fun i used only the most basic rakes, also just for fun as many backrakes as possible. Beacuse of that it only has a 10% smaller popultion than the regular silverfish
I wonder which 31c/240 spaceship is the easiest to build a gun for

What about an eater?

Perhaps a Heisenburp Device could help?

[dvgrn]

I wonder which 31c/240 spaceship is the easiest to build a gun for

My guess would be that the leaf bugs would be easiest by far. I think I tried looking at a synthesis for the water strider, but it would have been a bit of a nightmare to deal with all the supporting gliders that pass back and forth between the two halves.

Leaf bug synthesis would take a lot of gliders, but it could be done in a straightforward way with gliders from just two directions, I think. Gliders coming from behind the spaceship would build the initial block tracks, then keep adding Herschels to the block tracks to gradually add more of the functionality to the front end. Maybe it would be easiest to simply suppress the sideways LWSSes with additional gliders for a while, until the correct gliders from farther down the leaf-bug spine start getting generated to support the LWSS+2G reactions to finally close those loops.

A leaf bug eater is ... sort of straightforward to build, but also fairly awful to contemplate.

I'm also very curious about what a 1G seed for a leaf bug might look like. In particular, is it possible to design one that's much shorter and narrower than the leaf bug, such that the spaceship would "grow itself" out of a relatively compact starting configuration?

[Neocaridina]

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[dvgrn]

Why has nobody been reducing this since june?

That's just the way things work around here. The number of people who have expertise in any specific topic is often quite small. When those people run out of ideas for making reductions, there aren't likely to be any more reductions unless someone decides to learn the ropes and become a new expert with new ideas.

If you ask this kind of question too often, you are kind of implicitly volunteering to do the work of becoming the next new expert!