Acid Model for Salvage Beams

Something i thought would be a huge improvement to designing salvage/mining vessels is applying the acid damage model to salvage beams, so they harvest not just the block theyre pointed at but the blocks around it. Then we dont need to use a waffleboard pattern to make sure we're mining effectively, we can use just one beam and expect it to scoop up everything in radius of it. Could even limit it to one output per computer then, and not have to worry.

You could come up with any number of ways to do it mechanically speaking, but thats the gist of what i feel would really help the matter. This would also mean the mining ai wouldnt have a panic attack from using too many outputs anymore, while still being able to mine at the faster rate having multiple outputs provides. They just have to aim, fire, and wait for the cycle to complete, then choose a new target.

Thats actually one of the things i thought would be an important benefit, but we also have to consider how much cpu usage calculating acid damage of an array of any size and correctly awarding minerals and blocks from the target compares to calculating 200+ current salvage beams and tracking their resource transfer. So there might only be one beam but there are five hundred blocks per tick being affected by your single ginormous array. Will that be better or worse, im not sure because i havent seen any raw data on server hardware/bandwidth usage or anything, you know? So if one acid beam is more resource intensive than a hundred smaller beams maybe we'll have to limit salvage computers to one output total by default, or leave it as-is, which kinda sucks in shipbuilding terms, where it can be difficult to fit the desired number of groups of the correct size in there without error. Some people would like multiple outputs for aesthetic reasons im sure, maybe theres a way secondary outputs can be cosmetic only or something. And some people of course like the challenge engineering multiple coherent parallel beams provides.

Does anybody know how much resources the new (acid) damage beams take up versus an array of equal size salvage beams split into optimal-sized groups?