I've been sitting in a turret watching this Trident try to gather a crate of ore now for 15 minutes and it repeatedly bashes the bow of the ship off an asteroid while it tries to arrange a collision with the crate to its center of mass.

Is there some way to fix this so that the NPCs don't try to act like they're a single point in space?

..also if you drop ore too close to a solid object.. some capships wont even attempt to pick up the ore but rather fly off into distant space.

when mining with my goliath i get some distance from a roid before i dump my bhm2 or my ship just wanders off.

These are not bugs. These are known limitations, and the issues underpinning them are pretty complex to solve in a generalized way, for an infinitely expandable and scalable galaxy.

We'll take a look, when we get a chance, I'm not sure when that will be.