So I play a feral guardsman who focuses on close combat and I just forsee myself getting chewed to bits by the shooty guys as I charge across the fields to rend their limbs away from their body. So my question is do they have any rules on shields? I looked through the main book and I could not find anything. If there aren't any rules does anybody have any house rules? Please help there are only so many shotgun blasts that I can take to the chest before cleaving skulls and eventually meeting my doom

Thanks

Inquisitors Handbook has them in it...

Yeah, the inquisitors handbook has a bunch of shields that you can hold as cover, upping your armor as you go into combat. You could probably change the shield in the core book to give a bit of cover on a couple locations too.

Just remember cover gets destroyed as people shoot at it.

I'd recommend talking to your allies. Any weapon capable of full auto bursts can be used for the Suppressive Fire action. That means the enemies have to keep their heads down, move into the next available cover and can't take more than a half action within their turn, giving you ample time to move up to them - running makes you harder to hit, by the way. And assuming you have an agility bonus of 3, you can at least move 9 metres on a charge.

Now while I would advise against the action of a player I once gamed with (who let his feral guardsman charge across 150 metres without cover towards two non-suppressed enemies), melee combat is among the more powerful elements of the system.

I have a player that trots around with an arbites and those guys aren't complete without a riot/swat type shield so besides the usual rules for shields I also gave it 8 armour points.

It sounds very powerful but seeing as it gets damaged it becomes less useful. Which locations this covers depends on how you use it though.

My arbites version has a gundock(acts as a recoil glove but weapon needs to be attached and detached as a full action) and so covers head, torso and arms. Unless you go swinging into melee, then your melee arm is also out of cover.

Shields can be used as a parrying weapon: it has the defensive quality which gives +15 to parry vs melee (can't parry ranged AFAIK).

In addition I've housruled it to give a -20 penalty to ballistic skill test against the target, as long as the shield is in the right direction, the ballistic weapon is not primitive (except for gunpowder weapons). This is for primitive large shields (roman style), ballistic shields and whatnot should give the same penalty to BS against all weapons that does not penetrate it's armor, or simply give extra APs in one direction as others suggests here.

My players thought this was very powerful now that they are in a feudal world, and they were armed with bows, longbows and a composite bow, as a bandit armed with mail, shield and axe was nearly unstoppable (-40 BS as he was engaged in melee with a party member, and 50% chance to parry melee attacks in addition to 31% dodge.

But as I recall -20 ws missiles was the norm in Warhammer fantasy roleplay and I thought it would work in 40k as well.

You'll find some fan-made rules for shields over at Dark Reign also. http://www.darkreign40k.com/weapons-and-armour/index.php