Currently, radiation is a binary effect. In more than one way: You're immune to it, or you aren't. And if you get hit by it, you are dying unless you get to a convenient station or use (very rare) decon gel to clear it out.
Here's the idea that prompted wolfy to poke me over here. Keep in mind this was invented in under a minute on IRC, so it's not fleshed out fully. It's also not the proposal of this thread, so feel free to have a competing idea for how radiation could work.
Shrike's Spur-of-the-moment IRC idea:
Radiation weapons would switch from "Radiation 1" to a 1-7 value, similar to WMD. They'd also, as with all weapons, have their damage roll. One of these two would need to be used for the strength of the contamination, the other would need to determine the duration. There are good arguments for using each one in either slot, so I'm not going to bother trying to nail it down.
Each ship and station would track its radiation level, starting at 0. When it reaches a certain value, a timer starts. This tracks time until fatal exposure. The amount of time increases as your radiation level decreases (through time or decontamination), and decreases as further radiation is applied (so irradiating something to death in seconds would be possible with a suitably insane weapon). However, recieving a dangerous dose alone wouldn kill you: The timer would. So going a little bit over wouldn't be an instakill, and NPCs would be more resilient.
Now there are at least two ways to handle the actual method of doing this, so here's the ones I can think of. Either:
1. When a radiation overlay is applied, that overlay applies a radiation value to the object it hits, until the duration of that overlay ends. When it is removed (by time or by a decon barrel), that value is removed. This might require allowing radiation overlays to stack, and probably some graphical tweaks.
OR
2. Each overlay applies Damage Over Time to your rad count, increasing it at a rate set by the weapons attributes. Your value would have natural decay. This would mean that even after the overlays are gone and your ship stops glowing, you need to be careful about radiation exposure if it's passed the "potentially fatal" level. Having an autodoc on hand would significantly improve this decay rate.
Again, there's reasons I can think of for both methods. The first is simpler and more intuitive, the latter is more realistic and also lessens the inevitable nerf to radiation weapons that this whole line of thought would bring in. The latter also would allow partial decontamination methods: Eg: Using organic acid to try to dissolve the contaminant off your armor, at the cost of some HP. (Yes I do want organic acid to be a "universal bandaid for status effects that hurts you a lot")
There's also some questions about immunity and resistance. Should it stay as a binary yes/no? Or should armor mass play a role in exposure instead/as well as flagged immunities? And should more gear become rad-vulnerable so the system can get brought into more use? (Armor rebalance is coming...eventually...so now's the time to think about this, I think)
Ideally when genome customisation is introduced, further radiation resistance (and recovery rate modifiers?) could be set on that....but that's a way-off thought.
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So that's my thinking....what have other people got? The point of this thread is really to collect more ideas, feedback on ideas, and maybe come up with something that could theoretically get introduced for 1.7 or 1.8. Radiation weapons haven't changed since the game was brought in, and that's a problem. They're an instakill on enemies, and have no effect on living stations. There's a lot of possibilities, and it'd be nice if we can work out some ideas that might go somewhere. So let's give this a go, shall we?
