One of the things that I like to do when I'm preparing to run sessions is sit down with the PCs' character sheets and take a good look at the sorts of skills and powers that they have, and then try to work in opportunities for them to use those abilities in a way that impacts the story. So far, it's been working pretty well. Unfortunately, I've hit a bit of an area where I don't have a clear set of guidelines. The party's Guardsman has Drive (Land Vehicles). In fact, being a low-level Guardsman, it's pretty much his only skill. I imagine that he'll be purchasing Pilot pretty soon, as it just became available to him. Dark Heresy seems like the sort of game where you'd expect a lot of opportunities to use those skills. High speed chases, mobile combat, dogfights, etc. I haven't had much luck locating any rules for that sort of thing in either Dark Heresy or Rogue Trader. Has anyone come up with any sort of good vehicle rules? How do you calculate damage to vehicles? How do you simulate crash damage? At what point does that stolen Vulture blow the Hell up?

Any thoughts on vehicle rules would be appreciated.

There is some "Apocrpyh" with Vehicle rules form the Old Black Industries, but I do not know if they are still around.

There was a "re-make" of said rules on the DarkReign-Webiste, but since this work used images without having the license for it, it might have been removed due some legal issues that arouse lately.

Anyway, I wonder if one really needs this rules. In fact, it might be better to just think about the situation, think about the difficulty, assume what happens if the pc passes the check / passes them not and if the checks are contested or not.

For a "car chase" I would use contested skill test, giving bonus along the lines of "persumed advantages" (like faster vehicle, better knowledge of the city grid and the like). If one of the drivers assumes a set number of success, he caught up (or got rid of his persuer).

You could as well break it down to a number of events (one for every "obstacle" like grox in the way or tight curves) and make single test for each. Sooner or later.

Finding the Dark Heresy Vehicle Apocrypha somewhere should be possible.

Other than that, their removal from the official sites leads many people to assume that a new vehicle supplement (dealing both with smaller space vessels and ground and air based ones) will be released for Rogue Trader.

You can find a free downloadable pdf of Apocrypha at: http://download394.mediafire.com/yxm7udxmemhg/gltmyjiywmt/DH-Apocrypha-Vehicles.pdf. Hope this helps.