My reputation with the Colonists Faction was "Honored", for mining - you shouldn't receive any bad mojo if your reputation is friendly or better. The Destillery (Distillery is the correct spelling) has sathium ... presumably based upon your reputation guidelines, one could mine this sathium without any reputation degradation. My reputation was immediately changed to "Unfriendly".. for 14 sathium ore. Which seems to be in disagreement with your reputation scaling for any faction that is honored or better. While its an asteroid.. it is still a node and still their territory. Then, to fix your reputation with them, you have to destroy buildings and ships owned by Pirates. Doing anything to the pirates.. destroys your colonists reputation. Seriously seems completely broken. You end up in a constant state of unfriendly regardless of what you do. The problem lies in your making the Colonists own buildings that are required to visit for the main story line.. You can't destroy ships without killing occupants.. you can't destroy cores on orbital bases.. without killing occupants of said bases.
Yet, mining a node, inside a faction territory on a planet that's in the ground... isn't? That makes.. ZERO sense. There is literally no difference.
Blame the devs for this..... We've pointed it out to them many times now, and it's an easy fix, but they still haven't done it. See, the issue is that asteroid POI's are actually base blocks, not terrain. So you weren't mining terrain or deposits there, you were destroying base blocks.... Which is always a hostile action. All the devs have to do is add in a disclaimer in the faction screen saying that resource asteroids count as base blocks and not deposits, yet they don't update it. The only way for a player to know this is to read the forums. It would take 2 minutes to update the faction screen to show this info. And yes, in order for resource asteroids to work they have to be base blocks and not terrain. They still haven't solved that issue.
I can also sit here and say it should be common sense that they won't like you for mining the asteroid from under their base, and yet the game tells you it's okay to do when it isn't. As far as the player is concerned, the game by all accounts indicates it should be just like mining deposits in faction territory. Yet it's not. So no matter how you spin it the devs are at fault for failing to communicate it correctly to players within the game.
I modified the reputation schema to allow mining without penalty. Literally the only way around it right now. Or, just don't mine it.. even when your reputation indicates you can.
Yeah in my scenario I added that as a warning to the description of most space playfields as well as added it as a loading screen tip. But in the default game there is no indication of this. Factions shouldn't allow you to mine their asteroids, as that's literally part of their base, but it needs to be communicated to players.
To be clear, I 100% feel it should be a negative hit to reputation. That part is correct. The part that isn't correct is the faction info screen (in vanilla). It should 100% be communicated to players correctly. As I said earlier, common sense tells me they shouldn't like it. The game tells me it's okay though (when it isn't okay).