It's possible to create a spaceship whose front end is a wick stretcher that extrudes a wick. The rear is another spaceship of the same velocity that eventually hits the rear end of the expanding wick, but instead of being destroyed by it, ignites the wick so it burns cleanly at a higher speed than that of the spaceships, until it reaches the front spaceship, at which a new wick is extruded, ad infinitum. The population is a sawtooth that oscillates between that of the two spaceships alone, and that of the two spaceships with a fully extruded wick.Book wrote: November 13th, 2021, 2:00 pmIs "Growing/shrinking spaceship" (wiki article) a thing? If so, what is an example? Or is it an aspirational concept?
There are similar stationary high period oscillators that work on the same principle: e.g. a glider gun fires gliders into a distant mechanism, creating a crystal, and subsequent gliders hitting the crystal slowly grow the crystal towards the gun. Mechanisms near the gun ignite the crystal into a fuse that burns away, once it reaches the gun.
Examples of both of these have actually been constructed.
