"You can use tape to hold down one or both mouse buttons"
I just use a weighted object to hold the buttons down. Tape leaves that sticky residue.

Caution: I gave myself a bad carpal tunnel episode doing this, so ymmv.
For those like me with carpal tunnel due to my writing books all day:
You can use tape to hold down one or both mouse buttons, so you relieve the work on your fingers, hand, and forearm muscles. Done this a couple of days and no nerfing of my account, so i think its okay...? But I wasn't afk except bio breaks.
Caution: If you are to the stage of war with other factions, they will try to retake their systems you captured while you are "afk" if so. You will lose them and your war bar will move left. Not sure what happens if you get beat back all the way to 0 but I'm guessing they conquer you and you have to start the game over? YMMV. I went to the bathroom and returned to find I lost two systems out of my 3 for the questline.
Best practice: Do this BEFORE going to faction war in the storyline?

You can do that from your mining ship, too. In the asteroid field, find the type of rock you want to mine.
Launch Misactor. pop a tunnel straight into the core. Release a worm and watch to see where it disappears., Mine right toward that last yellow sighting. You will find the colorful ore. (see my prior posts below)
Return the misactor to your ship, and pop out into your space suit. Fly down to the bottom of the tunnel.
With the hand drill (tab) you got from joining the mining guild, you can clear a shelf or tunnel next to the ore deposit, as flat floored as you can manage. I like to dig 2/3 around the ore, giving myself a tight tunnel end to trap myself in.
Turn towards the ore, crank your mouse wheel up to 99% efficient and mine away! The ore will mostly stay put and you will continue to extract units every few seconds. Sometimes 3 in 3 seconds. Other times it will go 20+ seconds then pop 1 again. You get XP for every extraction and will soon be level 100+ in the mining guild.

PLANET MINING
1) find a planet with a location "Pit" in the name.
2) go to location
3) get out of ship and go down the elevator
4) run along the tunnel until you see some material to mine.
5) hit the TAB button to open the mining laser
6) hold both mouse buttons to mine continuously
7) resources got to Ship Cargo

https://youtu.be/XZXKSmImQg0

Yeah how about mining on Planets? You join the mining guild and get a free hand laser; But it don't tell you anywhere how to use it.
That may be more helpful than just skipping to the 'Spend money on an entirely new ship and equipment for it' part.

HOW ABOUT MINING ON PLANETS...

4) Hot tip! When you find a Platinum or better asteroid, go to the nipple shaped bump on it. My last 7/7 I found the main ore deposit straight down.
YMMV if you tunnel or 2 to get down there. I ruined an Asortek deposit by tunnelling into it, leaving no resource left but a little green ore. I deleted the deposit! doh.
Go at an angle then? & fly to the bottom. Mine in random directions looking 4 color, or launch worms. They glow yellow thru stone, but they dig long rabbit trails.
They stop on the edge of a deposit, But no longer show "on radar". So you have to watch them to see where they stop showing & drill to that area.
I launch 1 at the bottom of my 1st tunnel & track them with the laser... When I cant see the glow any more I mine that way.

Exploit?:
Might try to wall glitch to see where they are? They glow red when they find resources, & by wall hacking you'll see the edge of color thru the rock where they stopped on the deposit, but that's an exploit.

3) Yes you Can overload the ship and make it home. So get every last piece of ore out. I just returned with ~550 gold plus a bit of stone. Your mining drone cant make a 6th stack in it, so return to the mothership to drop inv, then go back and mine max inv & load up again.
Ship is dragged slow to -87% penalty in hyperspace. Np, just go bio & grab a drink and you'll be flipping around the station anyway. But do remember this will happen if you are a long jump away from a mining station. YMMV.

2) Yes, you're crazy, but the asteroids ARE moving, too. Seems to be orbiting the star, lol wow! Not sure how accurately, but I had to park my ship on the leading edge to get it to stay with me while mining.

I found an Asortak asteroid! Looks like your gonna strike it rich at 22.000 per unit! BUT there's only One unit in the whole asteroid. Send a worm or two in there. when they stop and turn red, bore in there, dig out all the blue stuff, and you'll have one unit of Asortek and an inv full or stone. Dump the stone and go find a gold asteroid, or better yet, Platinum. (big money) Fill up, ditch the stone once in a while, and grab all the precious metals you can find.
There's a mining ship at the guild station for 300k which will take all the mining modules they give you. Handy. Especially if you have a cargo multiplier module...
You find it in the Guild market at the "Epic" kiosks which are for tier 1. It's the one used in the video above but he bought it off the vendor kiosk so he couldn't show us, right? lol.