I've read an older thread about friendly targets blocking your shots and from the suggestions presented there I decided to go with a simple -10 at shots.

My question is, what happens in the case of enemies blocking your shots? What if an enemy is hiding behind another enemy of the same size?

Can the player hit him at all?

Elesthor said:

How could the attack get to the hiding enemy to hit him ?

If you can answer that for a specific weapon, the answer to your question is yes. Otherwise it's no.

Though I'd suggest allowing it for any weapon that ignores cover.

The Rogue Trader Core rulebook includes a mission where the PCs fight in a crowded marketplace. Until the crowd dispersed, every time someone was attacked they had a 50% chance to gain 8 cover for that attack as an unlucky bystander gets in the way. The bystanders being unarmoured humans.

When I first read the title of this thread I thought you might be referring to human shields, heh. In that instance I would just use location hit as if hitting the person aimed for, and if it hit body and the armour pen was high enough you could possibly shoot through the human shield. If you are aiming/ calling a shot ect this would of corse reduce the chance of hitting the hostage.

I think bilateralrope has a decent rule there for what you are describing.

Really, there are 2 things to be considered. The first is the angle of the attack - if you're off of an imaginary line drawn by the positions of the 2 characters, or if you are above them (or below in certain circumstances), then you might have a shot. The other is the relative size of the opponents, i.e, if the one in front is Hulking and the one behind isn't, I think it's a moot point - you could argue that you can hit the leg, but anyone who knows anything about shooting would know that you go for the chest, so you probably wouldn't bother trying the shot. Basically, both of these considerations are to deal with the question of there being any exposed parts of the target. If not, you could use a combination of Toughness+Armor to determine a cover bonus to the target's armor, with both being reduced by AP (as a special rule).