The problem with my design right now is that it cannot build directly on top of itself - it dosen't have the clearance. We would therefore have to build the copy to the right to make room, and while that is possible, in order to use the same tape at the other end of the spaceship we need another relay circuit to propagate the tape.EvinZL wrote: December 19th, 2023, 10:04 pm For managing the instruction tapes, we would still need something like the contraption I posted. As 7 lanes are proven universal, the corresponding my contraption for 7 lanes would be 12*14+7=175 blocks per side, plus 7 reflectors to get them to the right channel totalling 196 blocks. For the alternative design we would need 12*6+3=75 blocks for my contraption plus 468 blocks for the construction arm totalling 543 blocks. Using blocks as a measure of construction difficulty, the complex design has 2.77 times as many blocks. Given the encoding it seems like it could be worth it doing a complex design, but if we find a better set of restricted-channel operations it could change. But for getting a simple one working it would be easier to build the no-decoder design.
I think with your design, we're essentially offloading more work to the tape, which, yes, would ultimately reduce the tape length because of less blocks, but it does take more tape ships because it takes multiple to encode one operation. If one operation costs on average more than about 3-4 ships, then it will take more ships (assuming each block takes the same amount of time to build, which probably isn't true). Though due to repeat time, your constructor would most likely be able to pack ships tighter and therefore still decrease the length (although the population will increase).
As is, your contraption for relaying the ships does not work, because it reverses the relative position of the tape ships. Is there something I'm missing here?
Edit: Ahhhhhh, yes, I was missing something. We could simply reverse the order again on the other side, no?
