WEll, if you find a field that shoots out stuff when you blow up the small rocks, there ya go! That's all there is to mining in FL, you can use anything to mine in a field.
Just need a ship, and a gun.

A good idea is to have a group of two people and have one shoot the rocks and one to go and pick up the gold, or whatever you are mining. It would work also with bigger groups and just split the money.

QuEsTiOn AsKeR
Last Hope MOD
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It is best to use just one gun when mining the asteroid fields. If you use full guns, you may blow up whatever you are after! In some asteroid fields it is easy to fill your hold with FREE goods to trade. (Costs you nothing but time.) But some others have been heavily mined already and you may have to fire at 8 or 10 asteroids just to get something from even one of them.

Some of the things you can get for free: water, oxygen, hydrocarbons, copper, silver, gold, diamonds, alien organisms and alien artifacts. Be careful with the alien organisms though, since they die very quickly once you have them in your hold. Unless you are very close to a base to sell them, you will probably lose most of them and arrive with an empty cargo hold.

use turrets, find a good place and slowls more in it, about 15k

Perhaps oddly enough, shield buster type weapons seem to work better for mining metals and diamonds- I noticed a definite increase in the 'Harvest' when working the same spots in the same fields. Don't know if this works in hydrocarbon or water fields, however...