Barrel
The barrel of a gun or a rake is a path along which the output spaceships travel. The term is most commonly used in the context of the number of barrels a gun or rake possesses, which is the number of distinct spaceship streams emitted by said gun or rake. For example, the AK-94, Period-184 glider gun and Simkin glider gun are said to be double-barrelled because they produce two streams of gliders. The period-256 glider gun and Gunstar and its variants all have four barrels, P94S contains 12 barrels, and Herschel conduits can be configured to have as many barrels as necessary.
Given a gun with multiple barrels, one can eliminate barrels by simply placing an eater in the path of the unwanted glider streams. Unwanted barrels of a rake can often be eliminated by adding sparky spaceships that move with the same (simplified) speed and delete the output of the rake.
| Period-156 glider gun with 8 barrels highlighted with an envelope. (click above to open LifeViewer) RLE: here Plaintext: here Catagolue: here |