Using a Turtle to mine blocks it normally can't?

Basically, I'm looking for some ideas on how to get a Turtle to mine blocks with toughness stronger than obsidian (or at least detect the toughness of these blocks so that it can go around them). I'm also trying to keep an eye out for any possible means to silk touch with a Turtle. I'd like to avoid adding more mods to the server just for this specific task, but I'm keeping that idea open too.

The blocks in question are ores from various mods such as Metallurgy, Rare Ores, Tinker's Construct, and others. They are all mineable but require higher tier picks to do so.

I've read many forum posts where admins were greatly opposed or disinterested in adding the capability of higher mining or toughness detection, instead suggesting that we silk touch every single ore beforehand and load the turtle's slots up for comparison. But in a non cheaty survival server, that's just really not very possible nor efficient. Some ores can't even be silk touched, and Turtles have very limited inventory space. So rather than go that route, I assumed I would have to do something like.. moving a block breaker along via a Turtle. The problem I've run into is the fuel costs involved. There are 2 different block breakers on the server that I've found. The one from Minefactory Reloaded, and the one from IC2/Gregtech, and both have pretty steep MJ/EU costs. Enough that I fear it may not be possible for me to run a Turtle unattented for any extended period of time without having to constantly feed it new batteries?

I've also considered using a turtle to move around a Quarry, as I've noticed the Quarry is able to mine these higher ores. But that also has it's own potential drawbacks. One being the high MJ usage, and I don't think a Turtle can place a Tesseract and also connect it to a network. I also haven't thought of a way to notify the Turtle when the Quarry has finished.

So… Ask a Pro! Any knowledge imparted would be greatly appreciated.

The silk touch mined sample ore blocks is a good way to go. Turtles can place tesseracts that have been "locked" into their settings (in previous versions, this was accomplished with pulverized shiny metal applied directly to the tesseract). Engineering turtles can pick those tesseracts up without disturbing the settings.

Direwolf20 did a really detailed system regarding mining with turtles… https://www.youtube....h?v=uXhBzaaEtAs
[ this one is the one he had to do because RP2 was no longer on forgecraft - so he could no longer use his frame based mining well miner ]

his system is a little over the top, but it's chunk boundary protected… however, i don't think those TE redstone power conduits are needed, as in my experience the buildcraft machines will take power from a tesseract placed against them.

either way, it should give you enough hints to make your own if you don't like his version

Thanks for the fast replies. Like I mentioned earlier, I definitely don't think using silk touched samples would be a good idea as it would take way too much time and luck to aquire the samples, and the turtle doesn't have enough inventory space. But that engineering turtle + tesseract info is gold, I had no clue you could do that :D/>. I skimmed through that video ingie. I think I agree with you, but that video gave me a lot of good ideas. I'll have to bite the bullet on energy costs. Maybe I'll get lucky and find out a turtle can inject items into a Miner in the correct slots..

Ty both.

Edit: Answered my own question.