In my Week 2 Tarcles solve notes, I remarked that identifying repetition in the product is often a key element of Sum solving.  Well, here we are, testing that claim with vim and vigor!

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One way to conceptualize this product is as a set of three fire-salt-earth triangles, all with the same element orientation but varying bond patterns.  A simple hexarm can construct such triangles with absurd ease, as you see here.  That does create a fair amount of waste (3 atoms per product), but offers two big benefits: eliminating the need for duplication, and simplifying the geometry-wrangling from four nearly-unique pairs plus a singleton to three identical thirds.

With triangles built, bond-fixing becomes the main task.  Once again, identifying repetition was a central idea, because another way of conceptualizing this product is as three overlapping caltrop shapes...and a multibonder renders such patterns trivial to construct. This machine bonds the salt-center caltrop first, after which the earth-center and fire-center caltrop bonds are finished with one pivot and one slide--two cycles and a tiny amount of extra area.  The multibonder is definitely expensive, but I feel convinced that it is more than paying for itself.

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The main downside to this approach is that it creates four wrong-bonds in the initial triangles.  I luckily found a pivot point that can break them with 2 debonders and 1 pivot, which feels fairly efficient, but it nonetheless leaves me wondering if there might be a better fundamental strategy out there.