Variable Armour

[Endemion]

Iv been playing around with giving armour a variable damage reduction rather than a fixed value, and it seems to add an extra level of depth without overly slowing down the game or significantly changing the effectiveness of each armour type I have given the following values to armour

Flack: D6
Mesh: D10
Carapace: 2D6
Power: 2D10

Wile these values mean on average the armour is the same (carapace gets a slight boost) it also allows for things like hitting weak points allowing a character with a lasgun to luckily hit a joint in his opponents power armour and actually do some damage or to give a flack vest the chance of actually absorbing the force or a glancing shot and leaving the plucky guardsman inside unharmed. I have only tried it once so far but found wile on the whole everything was much the same it did allow of a couple of miracle/expertly placed shots and one lucky escape.

[MarcoSkoll]

This does add more time than you might think. Rather than just going: "Well, this is 2D6+3, and we need to take 6 armour off that", you've got to start rolling more dice each time.

Hitting Cracks in armour is partly abstracted into the damage roll (a good damage roll has evidently found a weaker, more vulnerable spot), but if you want to take it further, there are rules like in the Space Marine DM article which work well (where you get to trade a placed shot roll to halve armour)

However, there was a theory a while back about increasing the effectiveness of some of the armours going around before, and it was a little more "quick and easy".
When you've figured damage, you get a D6 roll to try and get over the remaining damage. If you succeed, you've stopped all the damage. If you fail, you don't save any of it.
Power armour probably would've only got a D3, otherwise it would've been crazy, but it did work reasonably when I tried a few playtests.

Still, I don't necessarily see that a character taking damage is necessarily a sign that you've gone straight through their armour. Flak armour is rather flexible, and while it might stop a bullet actually making a hole in your internal organs, it won't absorb the actual impact very well, so it could still pull muscles, break bones, etc, even without actually being penetrating the armour.

The other big deal is the System Shock. Armour, even only a few points, has a big effect on whether damage exceeds the system shock value. So flak isn't that useless from that perspective. It might not save a huge number of injury levels, but it will often stop hits from going over your system shock.