Heavyweight spaceship

The heavyweight spaceship (commonly abbreviated to HWSS) or (rarely) big fish is the fourth most common spaceship after the glider, lightweight spaceship and middleweight spaceship. It was found by John Conway in 1970 and travels at a speed of c/2 orthogonally. Its domino spark can be used to stabilize several tagalongs, including sidecar and half of x66. It is one of only three known spaceships that is a polyomino in any of its phases.

Heavyweight spaceship
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Pattern type Spaceship
Family XWSS
Number of cells 13
Bounding box 7×4
Frequency class 15.7
Direction Orthogonal
Period 4
Mod 2
Speed c/2
Speed (unsimplified) 2c/4
Heat 19
Discovered by John Conway
Year of discovery 1970

The side and tail sparks allow an HWSS to make changes to other objects without being affected itself -- a "Heisenburp" effect. For example, gliders approaching from behind can be deleted in five different ways, or can be converted into a block, B-heptomino, or beehive, as shown below.

Commonness

The HWSS is the thirty-fifth most common object on Adam P. Goucher's Catagolue.[1]

It is the fourth most common natural spaceship, being less common than the middleweight spaceship but about 355,000 times more common than MWSS on MWSS 1.

Three Heavyweight spaceship eaters
Example collisions between HWSS and forward-traveling glider
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References
  1. Adam P. Goucher. "Statistics". Catagolue. Retrieved on June 24, 2016.

See also
  • 13P4H2V0.1 at Heinrich Koenig's Game of Life Object Catalogs
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