They are set to a different drill mode. That causes the different shape and mining type.

That's the one thing about the vanilla version that has always driven me nuts. Mining with laser drills in vanilla has always been like that. It's easier to just mine manually with the hand drill in vanilla or with the non-laser drills. Something that's been a problem with vanilla for a long time. The RE devs know better then I, but I suspect it's better in RE because of the way they set the configs around the drills compared to what vanilla has them set at. Just a hunch not backed up by any evidence but because in vanilla some of the ores (promethium and gold for example) are presented as nuggets for which you need an "ore scanner" to find and in RE they are presented as actual ores like iron and such to dig up, leads me to believe that changes in the configs were implemented in RE to make the that part (as well as soooo many other parts) of Empyrion extremely better to play.

I like to go back to vanilla some times just for a change of pace, but when it comes to using the laser drills on a ship to mine, I am reminded how frustrating vanilla can be in this and some other area's to play. Looking forward to more information from the RE devs.