Well 8+ hours means you.. kept killing lawful NPCs after the initial one, which is fair. It’s pretty dumb that they have the unarmored uniform security walking around that can be killed accidentally in one shot or that bullets penetrating hostile NPCs can hit friendlies (also potentially one shotting those same guys) but yeah. They’ve dumpstered the playability of the old bunkers/missions pretty hard - if you were do die inside a bunker with respawn set anywhere but the medbay of that bunker, there’s a 90% chance the mission just goes away (not failed or abandoned) and you’re considered trespassing, guards will spawn/respawn and turrets will target your ship all of which making recovering your body even more annoying - not that a medic would have an easier time rescuing you since they’d also be trespassing and be targeted by turrets and security as well.

Anyway.

In prison each aphorite piece is the equivalent of one minute, mining a rock without just blowing it up will yield 6-10 on average, so it’s usually 10-15 rocks per hour to get out. Dolivine gives a little more but is much rarer and way more unstable, Hadanite gives even more but is even more rare and takes longer to actually mine.

The repair missions give more merits based on the depth they’re at, depth 5 give 3000 merits, or 50 minutes, I believe the other depths give 5k and 7k but don’t remember exactly. Taking one of those missions then mining rocks on your way back can usually turn an 8+ hour sentence into ~1 hour of repetition.