When I was first working on OWSS syntheses back in the 1990s, I had found a lot of ways of making the small engines with most arrangements of escort ships, but as the engines got larger, adding escorts on both sides got harder and harder. E.g. I couldn't find any ways of adding escorts on one side of 12WSS-14WSS.dvgrn wrote: ↑June 14th, 2020, 7:45 amExtrementhusiast's unmodified synth creates xq4_gocow211vwgocoz7ffy2vw7ffzy16g0gf, also in in 22 gliders.
A few months ago, I noticed that Catagolue had syntheses for some of the longer OWSS flotillae, including that 14WSS one from 30 gliders. All of them were based on creating a backbone of several instances of block-on-table, and then igniting them all at once to form the central spaceship. This made it much easier to add escorts, because the gliders needed to activate the engine all came from the ends, and not the sides. It turns out that slight variations of the same method can be used to create all of the smaller engines too, so that just leaves the problem of adding escort ships appropriately. Most arrangements are pretty easy, but there are still a few that are problematic.
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x = 213, y = 37, rule = B3/S23
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