So I read your Q/A about the small ship variant. A thought ocurred to me the other day that this thing is a fantastic tunnel-boring device. The large ship version is, obviously, too large to do any boring from inside a tunnel, though. I imagined some sort small ship version that was compact enough to fit on a reasonably sized vehicle and be used to make nice, straight tunnels and flat rooms inside asteroids and planets/moons.

My proposal deviates from the standard "make a small beam drill!" idea in that the device need not do any actual mining at all. It would effectively function like the alternate fire mode of any regular drill, destroying any voxel material within range to create a path to whatever your target is. Foregoing the mining function would conceivably allow a few concessions from your stated position on the potential small ship version:

1) the device could consist of only the base block, removing the need to do any coding for another turret piece.
2) the power requirements could be brought down considerably given that the block isn't mining/processing and that, as I imagine would be done, the max range would be reduced. (Maybe to 100-200m?)
3) the block size could be reduced to perhaps the size of a small grid large cargo container and bore a hole a few blocks wider than that. (Otherwise it would have the same limitations as the current beam base and not fit into its own tunnels.)

Of course, this is just a suggestion and not a 'request' per se, though it would be an awesome addition for me personally. haha

What do you think?

-Dakroth