An old piece of equipment once used extensively before the advent of mining beams, Pulverizing pods are basically crash-mounted drills that burrow into asteroids and jettison everything they dig up, until the drill is worn down, when the pod will self destruct. The low mining yields and saw this device quickly abandoned when more efficient mining equipment became available.

Mining Pod Launcher
Addon type: small port launcher
capacity: 4 pods
lifetime: 60 seconds
grid usage: 8
Mass: 1000kg
Mining Rate: 0.5
Heat: 0 <--- This'll make sense later, as will damage
Damage (at end-of-life): 2500
Hull health: 1000 (if NPCs shoot at it)
reload cost: 5k per pod
mining exp: is not given to player, as this would technically be a bot? debatable.

Manufactured at Orion Stations (chosen because the faction details specifically mentioned mining drill bits)
4x Basic Robotic Equipment
25x Bearing Grease
10x Coolant
2x Cooling Systems
1x External Equipment Mounts
2x Mineral Assay Equipment
5x Orion Drill Bits
1x Orion Extractor Component
1x Solid Explosives
10x steel

Player must have completed the Water Distiller mission tree (that tree is like a "manufacturing tutorial", and unlocks the improved mineral scanner already), or can be tied to a mission for surveying the unexplored territory.

How does it work? Treat it like a rocket launcher that launches a small sphere. When the sphere hits an asteroid, the projectile object is replaced by an immobile sphere-like NPC, which begins slowly mining. It likely won't get much ore out before it's drill bit reaches EoL, and the device self destructs to leave no junk behind in the hole it just dug, letting a new pod replace it. If someone were to try using it in combat for no good reason, the device would just ping off the side of a space ship.

So, why would anyone be interested in this old mining equipment? It doesn't heat up an asteroid it is mining, but due to the manufacturing and refill cost, it probably wouldn't be worth it for mining standard minerals, as it would eat into your profits. Here's where the *next* suggestion kinda begins. Incarnate had mentioned, back when the Unexplored Territory was being introduced, that he was considering a new mineral type to include in the new system (which I hope didn't end up becoming RHA). I suggest that this device should be used specifically on asteroid debris to obtain that new mineral or resource. Where beams cannot properly lock onto the looser material of an asteroid "debris", this device lands right on it, mines out random stuff based on a system-wide table, and damages the debris when it times out.

I'd note that this would be considered a deployable property - as in, other factions probably wouldn't want you deploying something in space they "own". As such, if a player were to use this in a faction-owned sector or system, that player would take a faction hit until the property was removed (by force). This is more to set precedent that player-owned deployable devices (i'm looking at temporary turrets short term, all the way to player stations long term) cannot or should not be deployed in or near monitored systems.

+1 changes to mining would be cool