Is there a faster way to mine crystalline formations? Holy heck that was a chore, at 30 - 40 minutes a site.

I made one interesting observation:

Gravity isn't modeled properly in Elite. On a couple of moons the shard chunks did not accelerate as fast as my SRV did from the height of their climb on the way down. On an airless moon, they should. One would expect a linear modeling of gravity at the least here, not even a more realistic progressive one from center of mass--but alas, we have neither.