By the book, any attack that gets as little as 1 point of damage through the toughness bonus of the space marine, and the armor value of the armor, breaches the suit and makes it no longer vacuum capable. This is why repair cement is standard issue, so that those holes can be patched up.

my question is this, how many of you have experimented with also just destroying the gear/parts of the armor from these damage rolls? For example, a space marine that takes a nasty sniper attack to the head, has his helmet broken and the visor no longer works properly. Or a powerful attack to the torso crushing the armor and making access to the space marine's grenades even harder.

I don't think it is something that should necessarily be done all the time, but done right I think it could add tension to a firefight. So, who has done it, and how did it work out for you?

Tthe rule on losing environmental seals is "damage greater than the armor points of his armor" essentially meaning if they suffer 11 wounds, standard SM armor is no longer environmentall sealed. Then if they take critical damage from behind, they roll to see what happens to the backpack.

If you wanted a rule, I would consider making the penalty mild and tied to the armor like the environmental seal issue. I would however personally just 'wing it' and plan on trying it out the next time I do something fancy to one of my PCs . It's a good idea to have some pre-thought out penalties though, as you suggest. Perhaps headshots could eliminate auto-senses and/or vox link, major torso wounds could damage the bio-monitors, legs could damage the magnetized boots, and arms the recoil suppressors. Seems simple enough, and if you don't use a hard and fast rule and just kind of surprise your PCs with it, it becomes that much more dramatic (provided they are used to the concept that their gear can be damaged- springing it on them might....irritate them)

As Charmander points out, it's *total* damage greater than armour, damage-before-armour greater than armour.

I'm generally not a fan of gear-damage rules. They're very hard to get right, and if they're overzealous they can make things feel farcical - if nothing else, it seems reasonable that a character's gear should get the same implausible survivability that the character does - I mean if *you* can survive a heavy bolter round to the face, your helmet probably should as well.

There's a big difference between the armour being pierced in one tiny spot (you don't need a big hole to let air out) from wrecking that section of armour. Bear in mind power armour is designed to withstand thick fighting by 40k standards. They're intended to survive ludicrous amounts of damage and keep functioning. Any attack(s) that are sufficiently powerful to wreck a suit of Astartes power armour are most likely the ones that kill the Astartes inside (or very nearly do). If you're going to use an armour damaging house rule at all, I'd suggest leaving it for when SMs have to burn a fate point to survive a ridiculously powerful attack. Even then, the armour may well be repairable back at the Watch Station.

If you want to destroy gear I probably only would do it when the marines suffers critical damage. But I usually forgo this as it only leads to bookkeeping and distracts from the game itself.

Nah, not looking for a house rule. Was just curious if anyone had done it, and how it goes.

As I said, it isn't something I would do all the time. But something special, like a Tau rail round to the head could do a lot of damage. Maybe even give the player the choice between helmet damage or the wounds. Mostly was curious if anyone had toyed with it, and how it had worked out for them.