Again my MD use getting me in trouble.

Hitting a gate with one shot of them puts me hostile with the local Trade Station and customs folk. Is the faction hit necessary on the gates? If it is needed for some reason for the way you guys 'build' the universe then so be it. It seems MDs are the only way other than spending 30 min shooting at the shields intentionally for this to happen. So I would dub it a small issue.

However, not sure if in some way related or even if what I think is happening is happening. Very hard for me to reproduce without dying alot (poor alot).

WARNING long, stop me if you've heard this one.
Giving too much detail since I'm not entirely sure what I can do to reproduce the scenario. Don't feel like reading skip to last line.

BUT, in a recent furball with a mixed bag of pirates m5-m6 (might have been an m7 in there...it was a mess). Also included where the local authorities and they were packing heat. This was a "very hard" patrol mission so I was not about to let a fleet lead by an M2 steal my thunder. Was flying a MD loaded Split M4 and was appreciating the fact that the patrols were there to be a distraction at least.

Well I had to reload the game 8x because for the first 7 times I became more and more careful on how I killed the pirates. I had to start the battle over each time since there was no way I was going to save during the mess. But every time on the death last 1 or 2 ships I would become hostile to the police. At first I didn't get it since they were sending m5's after me and I would pop them one after another then I noticed that they were the locals, not a new batch of pirates.

So what I noticed is that the last few ships I would go after were the big ones. And it was often a race of my MD's taking the hull down while the locals were taking the shields down. So I thought I must be going at it too hard and hitting friendlies, but I know I'm very precise with my MD and have never had this problem.

And the only thing I could think of is I started to notice that M5 icons seemed to appear from the fireball. They were way to fast for me to ID and I assumed they were crazy cops that flew threw the wreckage and I was tagging them. Then I noticed they were escape pods.

So I'm not sure but I think my last volley of MD is killing the escape pods of the dead ship and for some reason these are tagged as friendly.