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[New version nearing completion] Laser Welders :: forget your welding problems!

Attention: this mod is undergoing a complete rework and the working version will be uploaded separately because of incompatible changes.
You can have a look at the progress via this upload.

Donation is now possible! Here's the link.[www.paypal.me]

Sometimes, good things come in small packages. This is fully applicable to these tools!
Enjoy the power of Rexxar's Shipyards in a compact size of a welder!

These are vanilla welders and grinders which have an important difference: their area of effect is a thin (but long) ray. This means that they do not suffer from AoE overlapping issues and they can weld many blocks deep, at the cost of power usage and inability to weld big surface areas.
Additionally, they have a toggleable ability to weld/grind blocks one-by-one, instead of slowly operating on all blocks in a ray. This means, you can pinpoint a single block with your Grinder, and grind out only it!
They are also very convenient for building smaller ships from projection. There's a giant leap between vanilla tools and Shipyards in terms of scale of building, the Laser Tools are specifically designed to fit in between.

— Small Ship Tools: Max Range is 30 small blocks
— Large Ship Tools: Max Range is 8 large blocks
— Power usage: 1.2 MW ^ beam length (in meters)
— Configurable range
— Single Block mode (furthest for welders, closest for grinders)
— The actual welding only happens every 30 ticks (3 times less often than usual), which reduces lag significantly (speed per tick is compensated for this)
— Tools can have their speed increased up to x4 via increasing power input. Note that this is more efficient than stacking multiple tools: you save about 15% if you use a single x4'd tool instead of 4 in x1 mode. Not to mention that this significantly reduces server lag, too...
— When a laser welder cannot continue to weld a block due to missing components, it will show a big red notification telling what is missing.
— Both tools will pick up floating objects if the ray is pointed at them.

In order to help people who want to help me track down all the issues, I've included Public Debugging modes in the mod. With Debugging mode on, tools (especially welders) will report on their inner workings while they are welding or grinding blocks. And with Performance Debugging mode on, they will also report on how much time each operation consumes, which will (hopefully) help me to see in which case they consume a lot of time to work (and cause lag)
To enable them, simply write in chat:
/laserwelders toggledebug and /laserwelders toggleperformance
/lw is also an interchangeable shortcut.
Beware that these commands are limited to people with at least Space Master rights in their worlds (to prevent abuse on DS).

Async Mode is a highly experimental mode which can greatly increase performance, but is likely to be unstable.
By default, Laser Welders (and most other mods) do all of their work in synchronous, linear mode. This means, when their time to do work comes, they pause the world, do their work, and resume the world when they're done. This is why lag may happen. In Asynchronous Mode, most work (where possible) is done without pausing the world. This may remove the very reason to lag completely, but may cause issues with so-called "race conditions", when the mod and the game try to do same stuff or change same blocks in very same moment, which makes them fighting for control and crashing everything. I've installed several safeguards to prevent this, but I can't foresee every possible race condition. This is why this mode is disabled by default, but first trials are very promising performance-wise. So if you're willing to help polish this mode, type /laserwelders toggleasync and expect crashes.
Access limit is Admins and Owner.

This mod now has a config, which can be used to custom-tailor this mod to your needs. You can find it in your world's save folder, in Storage subfolder. All settings are pretty self-descriptive, except for maybe two: PowerMultiplier and PowerScaleMultiplier. The former linearly affects power usage: with settings where your tools were drawing 10 MW, they will draw 5 MW. The latter is more complicated. The power consumption formula is, in the simplest case, PowerScale ^ BeamLengthMetres. So, with the default ScaleMultiplier of 1.2 they will draw 6.1 MW at 10m, but with ScaleMultiplier of, say, 1.1, that'll be 2.6 MW at the same distance. So be careful when you change that.

— Laser Welders don't pull components in Multiplayer. This is because the ModAPI function which is responsible for determining if two inventories are connected with conveyors always returns false on dedicated servers. Fix in progress.
— Sometimes, you might not be able to enable laser tools via mouse-clicking. If so, use on/off switch (either in Terminal screen or from cockpit's toolbar).
— If you have Creative Mode Tools enabled in Survival, the welders will use components incorrectly (sometimes even building for free). It is a game limitation and there's nothing I can do about it yet.

To-Do list:
— Figure out how to change Drills' cutout offset during runtime
— Make a config
— Make Programmable Block integration for welders
— Make Welders tell which exact blocks are yet unfinished

— Big thanks to Ravic for helping me to debug the Welders on DS!