Very interesting, so gamma ray bursts don't seem as dangerous as one would think, at least against interstellar ships.
No clue, really. Just inferring. But it's not like the movies where a pink ray of gamma radiation shows up and vaporizes a ship. I know that much. I think the point of the whole thing is that it should be easy to avoid or protect against for any space faring civilization with half a brain. Don't get me wrong, you can totally write a scene where a pink ray of something blasts a ship in half at a critical narrative moment, but don't call it a GRB like you know what you're talking about. And by "you" I mean any of us.
It is a fact that short wave radiation, like Gamma (the shortest) doesn't pass through things easily. X-ray (second shortest) is similar, which you can easily see as it passes through soft tissue but not dense bone. Radio, the longest wave, passes through damn near anything, which is why your cellphone works through concrete walls up to a point (but not in a walk-in cooler whenever I'm trying to use an inventory or ordering app, which is hilarious every time I read something about the unstoppable magic of long wave radio).
The point is that we're protected from Gamma Rays on Earth today by basic lead shielding, not that I'm looking to rub my scrotum against a nuclear reactor wall or anything. The other distinction too is Gamma Rays are just radiation, like light, and are not physical matter. They can react chemically with things but not physically. But the GRB's, and a lot of other cosmological shit, are a byproduct of physical matter doing destructive things. So a GRB as observed from a distance might be harmless with adequate shielding, but getting closer to the jets of atoms moving close to the speed of light would be very, very bad.
Another side note there about black holes in fiction: the radiation, accretion, and other crazy shit happening around it would kill your ass long before you got "sucked" in. If anything, a approaching a black hole might be safer than approaching a star of the same mass, where the heat and radiation are infinitely hotter.
I wish I knew more about this stuff. It's one of those subjects that seems to go from basic/intuitive to incomprehensibly complex with no intermediate stage. There were exactly two astronomy courses at my university with no prerequisites. After that, graduate astrophysics that required several undergraduate degrees.
