Ship tool question and Blast Door Issue

Like the title says I have a question regarding the ship tools as well as an issue with Blast Doors that may necessitate the existence of another mod if the issue I'm noticing with blast doors is an intentional thing.

First up for the potentially easy one. Is there a way I can extend the range of a ship tool in one direction along an axis without having to extend it in the other 2 as well? As a hypothetical, let's supposed I wanted to create a junkyard saw tool capable of grinding multiple blocks down at once. How would I limit the sensor on the tool so that it grinds 5 blocks in front of itself and only 1 block to the left or right of the tool head, without sawing me in the process who is standing behind the tool head?

Now for the issue with Blast Doors that may necessitate the existence of another mod. Since this last patch from what I've noticed it seems that blast doors have lost their immunity to thruster flame damage and no longer fully block thruster damage from dinging blocks behind the blast door. Since mods can often be the chief culprits of certain issues I tested the vanilla thrusters to see if they were experiencing the same issue as well, and sure enough they were. So the issue was not exclusive to my modded thrusters. So this brings me to the big question in regards to blast doors. Is this a bug or was this an intentional thing?

The simplest solution for me would be to just remove thruster damage from my modded engines and call it a day. However I don't want to do that since that's part of how I give the thruster balance. So assuming I did have to create a dedicated heat shield block, how would I go about specifying said heat shield block as being immune to thruster damage?

Any and all help is much appreciated.