My biggest issues are with TB soak and the emphasis on min/maxing. If they fixed those, I would be a happy camper.

Speaking of damage, does anyone have any ideas of how to incorporate something like Beta1 's 'narrative damage' without slowing combat down even further? I like the idea of wound effects, but the Beta1 system was just too **** time-consuming...

I'm still in favour of taking a lesson from Inquisitor here. The Beta almost seemed to try doing so, but it still retained TB and was needlessly complicated to calculate/apply.

In my campaign, I've changed the way damage is handled to something more like Inquisitor . I've had to make some compromises to avoid the need to re-write all weapon damage stats and damage effects, and maintain characters' existing diversity in staying power (expressed in the Wounds stat).

My damage system essentially works as follows:

• Characters have a stat called Flesh Wounds (this is equal to their Wounds in the RAW system, minus 8). This works exactly like ordinary Wounds.
• Damage is reduced by Armour, but not by Toughness Bonus.
• Critical damage is tracked separately for each location.
• When an amount of damage would cause Critical Damage to a location, divide the damage (after reduction for armour) by the character's Toughness Bonus (round up). This is the amount of Critical Damage incurred by the location.
• Rules which are said to take effect when "[a character] takes Critical Damage" only take effect when the character has at least 5 points of Critical Damage. This is because, for instance, '2 points of Critical Damage' in my system happens earlier, and is further removed from eventual death and unconsciousness than '2 points of Critical Damage' under RAW.

The effects:

• Tough, heavily armoured characters become slightly more vulnerable to massed small arms fire and unarmed melee mobbing.
• Combat is more interesting, because characters suffer a highly visible progression of damage before falling.
• Characters can, in theory, endure an unexpectedly high amount of punishment if separate hits which cause serious but non-fatal Critical Damage are neatly distributed over all of their hit locations without ever accidentally knocking them out. (This almost never happens).
• For typical values of Toughness Bonus, Wounds and Armour values, survivability against typical weapons (lasguns, shotguns...) is very similar to RAW.
• High-damage weapons (Power weapons, Meltaguns...) have trouble killing targets outright when you might expect them to, but often they'll still cause something like 8 levels of Fatigue or Stunned for 4 rounds or whatever, so the target is still effectively out of the fight and the effect on combat balance is very minimal.
• Location-specific tracking of Critical Damage gives an extra incentive to use Called Shots, to hit already-damaged locations for optimal effect.

All in all, my players and I are very happy with the change, though I am considering making some changes to damage- and healing-related Talents to account for the impact the house rule might have had on their effectiveness.

My damage system essentially works as follows: [...]

Ah! Pretty similar to what I've been suggesting , except for the Flesh Wounds (I was thinking about using Wounds only to represent stuff like Sound Constitution or Unnatural Toughness).

Unfortunately I've not had an opportunity to test it in action so far, but I'm quite glad to hear that it would seem to work as intended!