I've been doing some research on realistic space travel and found that once you get up to extremely high speeds, space dust becomes mind-bogglingly Dangerous. Hitting a grain of sand at 10% of lightspeed would probably explode your spacecraft with force harder than a nuke. This could be implemented by basically having it so the faster you go, the more likely your ships are to randomly explode for no reason. A way to remedy this would to detach a bunch of parts in front of a spacecraft, so they get hit before your actual craft does. There could also be a "laser system" that would shoot down any dust in front of the ship.
while this is cool, i think that, if implemented, there should be a toggle for it like the re-entry heat damage, since this could get annoying at times.