H. G. Muller wrote on Wed, Jul 10, 2019 09:21 AM UTC:
Note that it must be trivially easy to checkmate a bare King with a Rhino, powerful as the latter is, in addition to covering two orthogonally adjacent squares. The checkmating applet cannot really do crooked sliders, but assuming that blocking doesn't play a significant role with only another King on the board, you can let it calculate a piece that directly leaps to the squares a Rhino would attack.
As is well known, the Gnu/Wildebeest, whose targets all fall on the Rhino paths, has no mating potential. This is due to a coincidental collision with the King. But just adding a single W move to the Gnu (say fW) already cricumvents this problem. So WNC, which is a subset of the Rhino (but leaping) already has an easy mate (maximally 19 moves).
The Mirror Rhino fares even better, as FN in itself has already mating potential (maximally 22 moves). The longer distance moves of the Rhino were only needed because without them no two orthogonally adjacent squares would be attacked.
Note that it must be trivially easy to checkmate a bare King with a Rhino, powerful as the latter is, in addition to covering two orthogonally adjacent squares. The checkmating applet cannot really do crooked sliders, but assuming that blocking doesn't play a significant role with only another King on the board, you can let it calculate a piece that directly leaps to the squares a Rhino would attack.
As is well known, the Gnu/Wildebeest, whose targets all fall on the Rhino paths, has no mating potential. This is due to a coincidental collision with the King. But just adding a single W move to the Gnu (say fW) already cricumvents this problem. So WNC, which is a subset of the Rhino (but leaping) already has an easy mate (maximally 19 moves).
The Mirror Rhino fares even better, as FN in itself has already mating potential (maximally 22 moves). The longer distance moves of the Rhino were only needed because without them no two orthogonally adjacent squares would be attacked.