How hard would it be to make the mining beam originate from somewhere out of your field of view? Right now, the beam begins abruptly in the center of your field of vision, and it looks bizarre.

lol, just strafe/turn a little bit..

or switch to 3rd person view, it looks pretty damn cool.

Yeah, but when you strafe/turn, the beam shakes. I already posted this suggestion in bugs, mainly because no other weapons originate from within the viewfield, so why should this one?

It will prolly be fixed later, the devs were more worried about getting the mining system working, and less worried about trivial things like just how pretty it was - that is something they want to improve, since they care for the game, but have the sense to prioritize below actual content and balancing issues.

It'll prolly be addressed in the 'misc. bugfixes' section of some future patch.