Combat Bug? Or just progression

Hi Everyone,

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So I've been playin Ed for about a year and a half. I have a corvette and am at about 82% through the dangerous combat level. I've gradually taken harder and harder combat missions and have been making progress but recently came across some strange things. So in the easy combat missions you jump to a mission area , and there are a bunch of ships flying around so you scan them to make sure they are a mission target and take them out. Then harder missions you start against an Anaconda and once you take it out a bunch of ships appear all attacking you–so you take them out one at a time. Recently I've started using a fighter pilot who is also at the dangerous level. Then I moved to deadly/elite missions. That's where things get weird. Used to be that any ship attacking you was red–so I would target them and take them out. But lately I've come across multiple scenarios where ships are red and attacking me-=-but clean–not mission targets. When this has happened I've checked to see if I have any fines or bounties but I had none–so why are they attacking me? Problem is if you have 10 red ships attacking you at once, and you happen to shoot one that is really clean–now you have a 200cr fine and when you go to a station you get sent to a federal correction site. In my case–that's 28 jumps from where I've been doing missions(CEOS). And that takes a half hour to get back to the original mission–very frustrating to say the least. Has anyone ever come across this? Are there any ways to avoid it? Thanks