ConwayLife.com

This thread is meant for collecting new ideas how to build caterpillar like ships.

After finalizing centipede / shield bug and water bear, what is the most promising case now?

Caterpillar's little brother is not a concrete project, the half bakery based caterpillar didn't attract too much attention recently.

I would like to see the idea implemented that was proposed for the 3c/10 pi reaction: A single very long row of pies produces downward gliders that are slow salvoing the burning helices needed left and right to build to rows of blocks that in turn support the single row of pies. Unfortunately, teh 3c/10 pi reactions are too fragile.

There is the (13,1)c/31 reaction that was also abandoned.

So what is the next option?

The engineless is the next big thing on the list. It also can move in oblique direction, and hopefully reach pretty high speeds. With some work we could probably cover any speed less than c/4 in any direction.

HartmutHolzwart wrote:I would like to see the idea implemented that was proposed for the 3c/10 pi reaction: A single very long row of pies produces downward gliders that are slow salvoing the burning helices needed left and right to build to rows of blocks that in turn support the single row of pies. Unfortunately, teh 3c/10 pi reactions are too fragile.

I searched pi wave puffer engines, but all I found were too dirty.

HartmutHolzwart wrote:There is the (13,1)c/31 reaction that was also abandoned.

The helix is humongous and 16x suggests a huge fanout device and a lot of problems with recovering the period. It doesn't look very rewarding