Let's talk aliens.

[jammi]

Open space is far more hostile environment actually, temperature drops and rises vary greatly. There are gravitational pulls, dangerous asteroid fields, nebulae of various chemical composites... If they didn't have sufficient protection they would not have survived there at all.

Biology student says it's not the thickness of the skin that matters with disease resistance, as opposed to the composition. Nomads feed off solar radiation, which implies live cells on the surface of the skin. Human skin is resistant to disease, because the outer layers are dead meaning bacteria (and viruses especially) cannot pass through the protective layer by active transport. Active transport needs live cells, because it's needs the additional energy from them. No problem there, seeing as Nomads are energy based.

Next, each organism has immunity cells. In humans this is mainly Macrophages, B Cells and T Cells. I assume Nomads would have some sort of equivalent. If a new deadly virus is introduced into a human system, your immune system will scratch is head in puzzlement, as it tries to work out what the hell is doing the damage. Depending on the toxicity of the virus, you'll probably be dead before a primary immune response can be mustered (in the case of HIV, the immune cells that prompt the primary response are destroyed).

Because their skin would probably be pretty vulnerable to unknown pathogens, I'd assume their primary defence mechanism would be their shield/veils. So, if in a combat situation, the veil could be lowered, it'd be fair to assume the Nomad organism would be open to infection.

That is of course, is based on the assumption that Nomad physiology bears any resemblance to a human's. The concept of active transport it universal though. That's biochemistry.

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