the ONLY thing I'd want to have the mining laser (and refinery?) for is to create anything I might need for my ship while Im out. (Like, uhm, repair limpets? Er, what else would be useful? Or not much at all?)
When you are in your ship next, go to your modules panel on the right. click the FSD, yours might be unavailable at the moment (because of a lack of mats but you'll still see what I'm talking about) you can increase jump range (for one jump). If you had certain weapons, you could create ammo for them. As you already stated, you want the ability to create repair limpets (click the repair limpet module and it will tell you the mats requires to create the limpets). All of these things require materials that can be found by scavenging around Geo/Bio sites. Any mats you don't use for these purposes are just stored, later, you will use them for engineering or trade them.
I imagine that 99.9999999% of CMDRs only go mining to get the stuff that eventually goes in the refinery (not the above mats), none of that stuff can be used for any of the above, it just becomes a commodity that you can sell. The other mats (like the ones above) are collected whilst mining but they're collected as a sort of by-product of mining, a bonus if you like. Also, a mining ship is far better equipped to make collection easier, collector limpets basically.
So right now you have a couple of (fairly) heavy bits of equipment to enable you to get the mats you need for things like repair limpets. One is (imo) fun and more effective (SRV) the other is just less effective (mining). The SRV is multi-use, can be used in missions, scavenging mats, sometimes abandoned cargo on a planet surface. The mining laser shoots rocks. I think it is about eventualities in the end. It would take a pretty rare set of circumstances for you to be in the position to need a mining laser to create repair limpets. This is the long way around of saying, you don't need that laser and if you're looking to add some ly, you can lose it and not worry.
BTW look now at what modules use what mats (repair limpets mainly in your case and possibly FSD boosting ). When exploring and you find a Geo/Bio site, collect everything. When in stations always check to see if they have a Material Trader (they'll be in contacts in station services), they come in three flavours, one of them trades in the mats you can collect in an SRV. If you find you have 20 of Material X, a material none of your modules requires, you can trade them for Material Y, a material your modules do use. Not all stations have a Material Trader. Not alll Material Traders trade the mats we are talking about here.
LOL yeah, that very first time I landed on a planet
When you are going to use the SRV to collect mats (or even run some missions) you're going to have to land on the bare rock. There is no auto-dock for that (at the moment). So again, landing is a vital skill. Keep trying, you will get the hang of it.
One more thing about your build.
Supercruise Assist. It's fine, I have it on most of my ships, but if you wanted to, you could lose it. It's advantage is that it doesn't allow you to overshoot stations (great when you are new) but it does make flight slower (you cruise at a faster speed without it) and at the moment, you have that in a ONE slot. You could get rid of it, move your DSS into the ONE slot, then move you SRV from the FOUR slot into the newly vacated TWO slot. Meaning you now have a spare/empty FOUR slot. You don't have to fill it but you could stick another Passenger Cabin in there (this will reduce LYs of course) or you could leave it empty and just use it as a utility slot, one time a cabin, one time a cargo rack. Just a thought.
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