Bill Hall keeps asking what would happen to The Wild if the double diagonal symmetry it inherits form its original seed were to break down.

The picture linked below might be a better response. Of all possible head on interactions between two asym ships (the more common of the two common varieties by around 4:1) just one produces a viable asymmetric seed, the Whoa seed.

Looking through the increasing range of simple seeds that have been run naked to 10000, Whoa stands out for having two distinct track laying engines up and running since either side of 5-6000. Those two are near the tips of the N and S beams in the linked picture, the N having switched to puffer much later.

Running Whoa on from where it had been left for quite a while at 35000, the defining event became the formation of a naked Delta (highlighed by thumbnail below) at almost the same iteration that The Wild gained its first engine of any kind. At that point the four track layers that existed at 35000 were eroding or reblocked far away from the core. (The one that was reblocked had already left debris to form an active island the first time it was deblocked and is the only one not destined to survive, being disrupted by the outgrowth of the debris form the first's conversion puff.

With three more puffers starting near the core and several more track layers, things only got more interesting, though the absence of block trail layers became almost conspicuous, until one formed in the middle of the till then virginal W face, then another on a small island that would become the SW corner of the core, both earlier than the first block track layer in The Wild. The first provided the second novelty (after the dominating wild Delta, one of which is poised to run free when The Wild can be restarted at 222000). In The Wild the first block trail Gobbler was quite a surprise, none appearing until the trails they gobbled had long lost their engines and were breaking up. Whoa's Gobbler started so fast there wasn't even a shifter to stop it reaching the engine, although again the engine proved immune to even accelerated attack from behind, the debris from Gobbler's demise forming a new active island.

The dynamics of ship flow sometimes make it possible to run the tips of beams far ahead quickly without needing to account for what the core might be doing in the interim, and it is only that which showed that both the transition between naked and rakeless Delta and the transition between track layer and puffer are reversible, and rereverible back too, the Delta engine eventually losing out to one disrupted puff before the engine with first mover advantage reverted. (It eventually turns puffer again but most likely out of reach of any affordable computer running the full Whoa pattern.)

Despite starting out growing much more slowly without the aid of symmetry, Whoa's precocious structure formation quickly accelerated it to well ahead of The Wild's population count at equivalent iteration. However that growth was already slowing well before it was stopped at 130000 for the picture linked via the thumbnail below and should be expected to eventually slip back behind.