[2022] Crashing in the middle of Battle

Four times in a row today trying to unlock Qwent (just need the trade mats) I crashed in the middle of combat. I had one mission to kill a deserter for 30 terminals, sweet. Now, obviously my vulture that I'm using isn't very engineered aside from the engines and shield. The target was in a wing of 3, so my plan was to get far enough away that one ship would just low wake out (one always does for some reason). The last two was a vulture with no PD and a python with PD, so I spent a good amount of time killing the vulture and then worked on the actual target.

Issue is that every time I would get close to killing the mission target Python, the game would crash, four times in a row now. No real idea why, as even though I was in each fight for a decent amount of time (around 20 minutes before the crash) I've been in CZ's for longer without incident. This is actively preventing me from progressing in the game, so any suggestions would be great.