Sunburn

[Songleaves]

To help give some more diversity in the biomes and health problems, I suggest adding sunburns. They would function just like a regular burn, but not as bad and without the chance of infection. There are two ways I could see this implemented.

Easy way:
Let sunburns be a random medical problem like food poisoning. Have them be most common in areas like the neck, face, ears, arms, etc. Sunburns can be more common in places like the desert, extreme desert, and ice sheet biome.

More in depth way:
Give clothing an intrinsic SPF value that helps reduce risk of sunburn, this will help bring to life some of the claims on the clothing like the cowboy hats and dusters which claim to protect from the sun but really just offer insulation from the heat. Can also have skin tone offer some protection against sunburn, and make higher elevation sites increase risk of sunburn. Of course it wouldn't make much sense to have a colonist getting sunburned who hasn't been going outside, so maybe use whatever metric is used to determine cabin fever to gauge how much time they spend outdoors. I don't know how you could prevent colonists who only go out at night (like night owls) from getting sunburns though.

[The-MathMog]

Would be a neat small feature. Shouldn't be too expansive. But it would be fun to see a pawn, run around outside all day without a cowboy hat, and then recieve the "burn" on the neck or something. Might be "hard" to implement though, at least in a maner that makes sense, where it should consider the apparel that they are wearing, and when exposed to sunlight etc.
Oh, and it actually SHOULD be able to cause infections, as severe burns cause blistering and are quite prone to infections

[mumblemumble]

Humn, this would also mean racial differences as well right? black people are resistant to sunburn due to higher melanin levels.

Granted this isn't 100% effective, but is much more on average.

Also I think eventually tanning would reduce sunburn risk, as tanning is producing melanin as well.

Side note, I learned stuff today! =P I didn't know tanning actually produced melanin.

Really, could be pretty easy to do I think, give darker races a higher sun resistance give excessive sunlight exposure a risk for burn (re code toxic fallout for sun and sunburn) and sunburns build up a tan, which in turn limits sunburn vulnerability.