I occasionally run searches that provide more feedback than my c/5 search. Here are couple of diagonal c/4 ships that have rather large sparks. I am sending them out as they emerged from my search program. All this means is that the glider accompanying the first ship is actually superfluous. (I did add the leading space by hand though).
-Tim Coe
The first of Coe's sparkers readily yields a new boat/tub extender:
--NDE
After sending out those sparkers yesterday it occurred to me that were good for nothing (except of course Noam's boat stretcher) without something colliding with the sparks.
I had built a few ship rakes back when period 16 puffer activity was running fast and furious, so I started firing them at the diagonal sparkers. The included pattern summarizes the most interesting collisions I came across. I just wrote an coordinate to rle converter. I do not have any thing that reads rle directly, but a conversion back to coordinates revealed no differences. Please tell if there is anything wrong in my rle representation.
It has been alluded to in a couple of places that the c/5 ship I found would most appropriately be called a snail. I also think that the smaller diagonal sparker looks like a swan.
Have a happy day,
-Tim Coe coe@vitsemi.com