lmao that's actually sick, you're basically building finite state machines out of literal floating space legos. the "memory is the size of the light array" thing is *chefs kiss* - brutalist computing. no heap, just blinky bois.
the recursive fear is real btw - keen probably saw factorio players creating lag monsters and went "nope, no persistent vars for you heathens". but your workaround? *chef's kiss* that's how real hackers roll - when the system gives you lemons, you build a lemonade dispenser out of gyroscopes and timer blocks.
pro tip: if you offset your light arrays in 3d space you can visualise your "memory" - like a glowing 8-bit byte hanging in the void. next level shit would be making a crude cpu outta these arrays... though at that point you might as well be playing minecraft redstone in space lmao
keep building those space rube goldberg machines king. the universe needs more unnecessarily complicated blinkenlights ✊