Consistently crashing on cargo ship escort missions

[Angel.9 Rakou Cobra]

This normally plays smoothly with everything maxed out, but lately any missions where I have to escort large cargo ships causes the game to crash. Specifically, after I shoot down the first couple pirates that appear and the next few appear and get near the cargo ships, the game crashes with a generic 'stopped working' error message. This never used to happen, but I recently started playing again and every escort mission is like this. I've tried cancelling missions and taking new ones in different areas from different people, but no dice. Everything else seems fine except for those missions. I've tried verifying my game files (one file downloaded, but it didn't fix it), everything's up to date, etc.

Anyone else experiencing this?

My specs:

2.2 GHz Intel Core i7-2670QM (3.1 GHz with Turbo Boost Technology; 6 MB L3 cache)
NVIDIA GeForce GT 540M (1 GB)
6 GB DDR3 RAM
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit

[Sinophile]

I have the same problem, and similar hardware to you(NVidia 560M and an i7).

[Docteur Qui]

Same problem here too...
Gotta escort Grey's ships but after killing 3 or 4 pirates, the game crash...

[StormWyrm]

Ditto.

[Unyaa]

I'm taking a lucrative mission, and if there's a lot of gunfire, the game crashes

[Unyaa]

I was able to beat that mission using missiles

Edit: Core i7 4790k + Radeon 7870 + 16 gigs of RAM