Might be my scientific background driving me to be anal here, so bear with me. I'm fine with plot devices trumping science, but they need to be well executed - that is, at least consistent with established canon and the observed in-universe tech. This is a perfect example of the opposite, however.
In the collector cruiser, you enter the ship through a hole in the outer hull. If there's indeed a breathable atmosphere within, there's no need for the masks equipped by the crew - if the environment is a partial vacuum, you still need to do something about ebullism (bubbles in the blood); if it's an unbreathable but pressurized atmosphere, how come nobody has trouble breathing aboard the collector base? The trap scenario also suggests that the scene was conceived to convey the idea that the collector vessel was little more than a dead, floating piece of scrap. This is supported by the fact that the collector vessel is stated to have suffered main power failure, with kinetic barriers offline. In the intro cutscene, when the Normandy is torn apart, the good old forcefield sci-fi cliche is used for atmosphere containment, so no kinetic barrier = no atmosphere.
And the naked EVA antics in the upper layers of a brown dwarf (and near the accretion disk around a black hole!) are even worse. Brown dwarves radiate more heat than they receive from the star they orbit (temp ~1000 K and upwards) and also emit hefty amounts of ionizing radiation. Personal barriers or ship-mounted shields won't help as you need magnetic fields to deflect that (or a lead shirt). Interestingly, they also equip gasmasks for that scene. If there was an atmosphere, such a thing wouldn't be necessary.
I'm not really concentrated on finding faults with the game, it's just that this is a glaring hole brought about exclusively by the removal of ME1-style wardrobes and their substitution with nothing. I guess different people have different thresholds for their suspension of disbelief, but I feel this was a pretty silly mistake to make, and one that could have been solved pretty easily. But then... they failed to solve it through DLC. D:
I wub this post sooo much
Do Dead Space next, what did you think of moving objects in vacuum space?