I just ran into a problem of taken down a harvester and by the time I got up to it, it had despawned and I got no loot from it. Took me a bit to do it so it was pretty frustrating. Idk if this iscommon but I hope not.
You will get better response on your posts if you include more information.
What system are you playing on?
How many people in the session? (Multiplayer or just solo)
Area of the map where it happened?
Type of harvester?
Free roam/mission/base-assult or defense?
There’s been a few reported issues of Machine corpses being moved away by physics, some are flung quite a ways. This may be what happened… Not ideal, of course. It’s being looked into.