For actually clearing out a vein, the advanced diamond drill is superior. It has a 3x3 mode similar to the tinkers construct hammer. The only downside is that occasionally you get some block desync where the client thinks a block is mined but the server disagrees (even in single player). Even with that thought its faster than the mining laser imo.
I've been looking for a better way of doing this. I built an Advanced IC2 miner, and that's good for clearing out one chunk thoroughly and since I'm running it off a magical energy converter it powers itself off the shards it mines. But it's sort of slow. I think I'll use this for ore veins that I want to make sure I get every last piece out of the chunk like redstone. I intend on building an Ender Quarry shortly as soon as I can figure out how to craft the BC quarry to build it. I'll use this for large swathes of land where I've found a high concentration of desirable ores in a broad area.
That still leaves situations where I find a decent vein while out looking for beehives and nodes. If I happen upon an iridium or diamond vein I want to grab it right then and there. Lately I've been using a void pickaxe enchanted with destruction enchantment. This just annihilates stuff as long as I don't run into too many chisel stones. Plus since it's voidmetal they regenerate without the repair enchantment needed so i can put unbreaking on it. If I use 2 of these and keep both in my hotbar I can use one while the 2nd regenerates back to full just switching between them. So far so good, but if I get on a roll with a vein i can sometimes forget to switch between the two and end up breaking one.
The only issue with an advanced diamond drill is power. Since I'm thaumcraft heavy I'm wearing void robes instead of nanosuit or quantum/gravi armor. This means I don't have a power source in my armor. Advanced lap packs I guess?
"We just upgraded to the modular CreoTek CreoStak 36 and our charcoal worries are over!"
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Nice aesthetics. If you're into thaumcraft you could clean it up a bit more while keeping piping costs reasonable by using some Transvector Interfaces to the coke ovens and running your conduit through those. That way you could run one pipe stack down the very center and hide all of that infrastructure. Then it'd look more like a giant smoke stack. Honestly, at first glance i thought the tree on the top was smoke coming out
I'm up to 48 coke ovens now, but I burried mine underground in my factory cellars with 6 ovens per layer with 8 layers. I use the transvector interfaces with enderIO pressurized fluid pipes and item conduits. This way I only have a single conduit stack up the middle of the layer, significantly cutting down on my electrum usage