flotilla

noun

/floʊˈtɪlə/

Etymology

From Spanish flotilla, diminutive of flota (“fleet”), from French flotte.

1
A small fleet of warships (usually of the same class), or a fleet of small ships.
- Toward the horizon a flotilla of fishing-boats showed immutable, pink-lacquered by the evening sun.
2
A small group of things or people
- After a few moments Chloe saw Rosamund walking towards them with a small flotilla of shopping bags.
- flotilla of tiny ducklings
3
A spaceship made of one or more central mutually stabilizing overweight spaceships…
A spaceship made of one or more central mutually stabilizing overweight spaceships flanked by lightweight, middleweight, or heavyweight spaceships that prevent the formation of destructive eggs.
- For rule R(2222) a flotilla of six gliders traveling eastwards is generated.
- Now, the smallest known Life spaceship that isn’t a glider, a *WSS, or a flotilla of *WSSs is the loafer, which has population 20 in a 9 by 9 bounding box.
- The resulting spaceship (shown below) has a phase with only 24 cells, making it in this respect the smallest known spaceship other than the standard spaceships and some trivial two-spaceship flotillas derived from them.

No curated loop yet for flotilla. Loops are being traced one word at a time while the ingestion pipeline matures.

sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA