User:Tropylium/Vessel

Vessels are a diagonally extensible family of strict still lifes. All vessels have a diagonal width of no more than 3 lanes. The basic structure is a series of diagonally connected pairs of cells.

The basic vessel is the four-cell tub, with two cell pairs. This can be lengthened to produce the barge (three pairs), long barge (four pairs), etc.

Adding a single additional cell at one end of a vessel produces the boat subfamily; adding cells at both ends produces the ship subfamily.

Boats and ships can be joined as single-point ties with each other or with other still lifes featuring a pre-block protrusion. Tubs/barges and boats can also be joined with each other as two-point ties, but this will only produce a longer vessel.

The block can be considered a degenerate ship of length 1, aside from the fact that it cannot be used in ties.

While vessels resemble a wider version of single-fuse strings, crucial differences result from the fact that the cells in the diagonal body already have three neighbors. No components can be attached to the body of a vessel, and although ships/boats can be joined as ties, they cannot be siamized in the same way other still lifes with preblock endings can. Sometimes a fuse body can be siamized lengthways with a vessel body though: e.g. a loaf can be siamized with a barge to result in loaf siamese barge, and a long barge can be siamized with cis-fuse with two tails to yield a barge with two tails. Larger examples will become increasibly non-intuitive.

Tub series

• 
  a simple tub
• 
  but now it's a barge
• 
  and a barge for ever after

Boat series

• 
  row row row your boat
• 
  gently down the stream
• 
  merrily merrily merrily merrily life is but a dream

Ship series

• 
  a simple ship
• 
  but this one's grown a bit
• 
  very long ship