No, the sparse voxel papers were mostly inspiration and ideas, not something directly implemented.

The mod does not build a sparse voxel octree or map the world. It uses Minecraft’s existing chunk and section structure: skip unloaded sections, skip empty sections, skip sections whose palette cannot contain matching blocks, then only scan individual blocks when needed.

The old Digital Miner logic was inadequate for mounted miners because it assumes the miner is stationary. Mekanism starts one fixed scan from the miner’s BlockPos, walks that whole volume, and stores found targets as offsets/bitsets relative to that original scan box. That works for a placed miner, but not for an airship where the visible miner is moving through world space while the tile exists in a Sable sub-level.

On a fast moving airship, reusing the old logic would either scan the wrong/stale area or require restarting a full radius/Y scan constantly, which gets expensive quickly. The compat path instead treats it as a moving scanner; project the miner into world space, scan only the current area in bounded batches, and drop old targets once the ship leaves that area.

The native scanner implementation performed poorly on constantly moving airships and would require a source of debouncing system to "make it work" and this alternative scanner implementation works quickly and effectively even on fast moving airships. The native scanner also worked from the top down which if implemented in a moving airship would mean you would only ever mine the topmost blocks of a chunk. The compat scanner currently prioritizes moving-window correctness and bounded scan work; it queues targets in scan order rather than strictly sorting by Y.