Hoovy

Nah, I don't mean the astrosphere, I meant outside of the suns atmosphere/astrosphere. And again, as I said previously, I misinterpreted what I read. Its not much to vaporize material, but it could quite possibly end a life fairly quickly without the proper precautions.

Sorry, re-read what I saw and it appears that I partially mis-understood what it said. So, you could still get vaporized, but not instantaneously. Another factor of that would be the plasma that is apparently there as well, and that would be more capable of vaporization.

I mainly meant your lifeforms will be gone quite quickly, not that the materials will just vaporize themselves. Only low quality materials that can be affected by radiation would get vaporized.

To start off with, I have suggested things for other games before, however, most of these are fantasy games. This is a realistic game, and thus, if my suggestions are hard to read, and you have a stroke reading this and die, then sorry for my bad "ordering" and explanations. I've also never really talked about physics much before, which is another reason this might be hard to read. Anyways, radiation. We know what it is, you get too much of it and you die. We also use it for power, which is why I think that some of the more efficient EC generators later in the tech tree should be powered on radiation, maybe not by radioactive materials, but radiation in space. Or this radiation could be used to turn a non-radioactive material into a radioactive material, which can then be used for EC generation. There could also be a toggle for kerbals to get radiation poisoning if exposed too much radiation, and if you don't get them to an area with mostly no radiation "quickly", they could die (or go MIA on easier difficulties). However, if this toggle is on, there needs to be some form of having radiation bounce off of ships, or radiate out of the ship during interstellar travel, due to what is known as "heliospheres." Basically, stars have atmospheres. Yes yes, the suns corona (which fun fact is hotter than it's surface) is an atmosphere, but it also repels radiation out of its most outermost layer of its atmosphere, which extends well past the Keiper belt. Most stars if not all have these "astrospheres" or "magnetospheres" (which the earth has its own magnetosphere), and outside of this, is an astronomical amount of cosmic ionizing radiation. Basically, if you decide you want kerbals and parts to be affected by radiation, if you dont have practically 9000 layers of 50 feet thick lead, or any other material good at stopping radiation, you will instantly be vaporized. While the astrosphere doesn't stop all of this radiation from entering it's system, it stops a large majority of it (excluding uncharged gamma rays), which means that if that setting is on, if 2 years of floating around the sun between duna and kerbin in no ship were to give a kerbal radiation sickness, being outside this heliosphere would cut that time down to a very short time. Personally, I don't know the exact specifications, but it would probably be a matter of seconds.