Are there rules, or has someone ever had to deal with this?

Space Hulks don't have components to repair. They're the twisted accreta of dead ships, lumped together by the vagaries of the warp into a single large superstructure. Even if you could salvage components from one, the Mechanicus would throw a fit if you tried to get them installed, as they've spent untold millenia completely unprotected from corruption by a gellar field.

CrazzyJimmy said:

There is the salvage system in Battlefield Koronus that allows for getting bits off of a space hulk. I know that there are stories here and there about refurbishing old wrecks. I'm not sure that there are rules per se about it but it would probably depend on just how much damage was done to the ship. Just enough to hulk it might make it take a fairly short time compared to making a whole new ship, a lot and maybe about the same amount, and a ton might make it better to just use the thing as scrap and melt it down.

On page 220 of Rogue Trader there is a blurb about destroying ships.. it says that ships are rarely completely destroyed and that even badly damaged hulks can be dragged back to port for salvage and refit.

In the past histories on page 198 of rogue trader there is one in there about being a space hulk before.

If I was running a game I'd likely find something fitting for the damage and usually have it take significantly less time to fix up a space hulk than making a brand new ship. I think that many, many ships being used out there have been hulked and refit several times.

This is actually very simple if you do a bit of digging in the ship rules section.

Go to the ship combat rules section and look at the ship critical chart. When a ship is hulked you roll for each component on the ship and see which parts are damaged or destroyed. Thus it should be fairly simple to do the same when your players run across a ship, figure out what components where on it, roll for each, the destroyed ones are lost forever and the damaged ones are repaired normaly (albiet still useless unless you're going to spend a lot of time salvaging them and have a ton of space to do so depending on the component in question).

A Hulked ship it's not the same as a Space Hulk:

http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Space_Hulk

Like the entry says, recovering a ship from a Space Hulk is something very difficult to do. Generally, only Space Marines on Terminator Power Armour can enter inside them. Even then, sometimes the foes inside a Space Hulk are soo strong that not even Terminators can fight them back.

I advice you to be very careful before going inside a Space Hulk, since it can be potentially lethal for your whole group. A couple of things that you can do:

1) If you have a Warlord Warrant, you can try to get help from a Terminator Squad. If you are not, you can try to ally with a Militant Trader and he can contact the Space Marines for you.

2) If you have Bloof of Martyrs, it's a good idea to have everyone's weapons and armours blessed to make them holy. Given time, the group's Missionary can do this (or you can try to find a Cleric in the Calixis Sector to perform the job).

3) Don't go alone. If you Dynasty doesn't have several ships, then make some allies or hire mercenaries (for example, look at the Brotherhood in BFK). More firepower the better (remember Space Hulks are very tought, and even Nova Cannon can take them down easily... if there are orks or chaos worshipers in there, you will really want to have as many firepower as possible).

4) Have at least one ship with the salvage component (I don't remember the name, but I think it's inside Into the Storm).

5) Make a good deadl with a Forge World. You will need several tech-priests to clean the ship's machine spirit and start reparations.

Other than that, you need good look and know when to run if things become to deadly. If you try this, let us know how it ended.

Maese Mateo said:

It looks like they use the same phrase in multiple places to mean different things. Page 222 of Rogue Trader literally has, 'Space Hulk' as one of the crit possibilities.

The link you provided is interesting though. It would seem that the original question was not sufficient to really know what was being asked.

It doesn't seem like it's much different in terms of salvaging capability. The variation seems to be only that as pace Hulk is several hulks that have been fused. I don't see this as much more of an issue as while many components would be destroyed in the fusion others would be available do to the second / third / fourth or what have you hulk that combined and likely had a ratio of broken/unbroken components on it.

Thus if we figured that the average hulk had x components active and that when hulks merged each lost 50% of it you could still break this down into a very simple mathmatical equation. Now few if not none would have power given but that's easy to reflect merely the damaged aspect rather than completely destroyed aspect. Overall the end call would seem to have to come from the GM. I would highly doubt any space hulk would have "absolutely nothing" salvagable considering their size and the number of components amongst them.

Like Dark Bunny Lord said, in the end is up to the GM to say what you can salvage and how difficult it will be. It's also fair to asume that more you can salvage, more difficult will it be to get it. If I was the GM, and my players manage to get help from several ships and even Space Marines, I would probably allow them to rescue a whole Hull and several Components (maybe even an Archeotech or Xenotech component if the fight was really tought).

Remember that even if you can't rescue many components, you can still salvage parts to sell at Forge Worlds like raw materials. So there is a lot of Profit to be made at a Space Hulk (and a lot of danger, of course... but that's the fun =D ).