(EDIT) Ressource Mining Outpost

Hmm. I guess I should edit the Idea a bit. 

We all agree that a Mining Outpost would make more sense cause of the Infrastructure it needs. And we all agree that it shouldn't count as Colony and has to be provided by "Logistic Ships" which deliver "Food" and "Industry" to keep your mining Operation alive.

Good.

How about what Kareal said, an outpost that doesn't turn into a colony.

You would need a special factory-class ship, moves slowly, and has a significant construction cost due to its size.

After moving the factory ship into the given system, you can issue a command to establish a mining outpost.

After several turns, the mining output becomes established, and it begins to generate the resource.

But an outpost doesn't generate FIDS; you are only collecting the resource.

Food would have to be brought in using logistic ships, otherwise the miner population would drop (0 = destruction of the ship?).

There would be an upkeep cost for the mining ship, something significant.

A further limitation is that you are unable to construct the infrastructure that would be possible with a colony.

Well, the implication of needing to form a colony ahead of time is that there needs to be some "local" infrastructure in order to support mining in the given system.

There isn't just mining crews at work, but there is processing, refinement, facility maintenace, food preparation, entertainment venues, and so on. There is so much activity going on, that you have whole communities of people, which naturally means families, and everything necessary to support those families, such as groceries, public school, adult education, domestic luxuries, etc.

One could consider the film, Alien, as an example of an unrealistic mining operation, the idea that a handful of humans could operate some manner of automated mining ship. You'll recall in the film that they were generally miserable workers and annoyed by each other. The funny thing is that in the game, Alien: Isolation, they had a "Nostromo-class" ship like in the film, but now it's a fully-functional community with shops and residential areas, and a population that is not entirely directly focused upon mining.

So I would be forced to say that in ES2, the implementation of colonization makes sense as a requirement before mining may occur. Even if one were to argue that ES2 could have huge mining ships that supported large populations, this is *still* equivalent to the effort of colonizing, just in a different form of building a huge facility (that technically is extraordinarily vulnerable to sabotage, terrorists, and enemy combatants).