A Glitch occurs when a piece of equipment takes a lot of damage, is hacked, infected or fails in some way. Depending on the nature of the glitch it can spread to take down an entire system. Combat gear can and is often hardened against glitches though they can still occur if equipment is not maintained,tuned or takes damage.
All Equipment starts life with a quality rating of 6.
If a player rolls a 1 on the Wild die, or an attacker rolls a 6, the DM can chose to have the equipment in use become Glitchy in which case the quality rating drops by 1 point (5).
If the glitch formed due to damage, normally the player would only take 1/2 damage from the blow as the equipment absorb the remainder.
Glitched equipment has a cumulative 1/6 change of failing each time it's used, check this only when it matters or once per encounter for weapons.
Simply have the player roll the wild dice if the number is greater than the remaining Quality something bad happens.
Every time it does glitch, it fails in some way ( DM discretion) the quality decreases (5-4-3-2-1) and the chance of further failure increases, and so on to minimum quality level of 0 (Broken).
Tech-Heads refer to this number as the glitch level.
Once an item reaches Broken with a quality level of 0, it is worthless and no longer functions.
To repair Glitched equipment by one quality level the Target number is 10 + (3 * glitch level).
A Trained Armour Tech can tune and add the appropriate fail safes to a set of equipment at a cost of 100 Creds per slotted item in parts. This Hardening work is not easy and The Target number to get an entire set tuned and protected is 10 + 3 per item in the set. A well fitted Tool-Box, Tech-Lab and Maint-Bot can help reduce this number, however this is definitely not field work.
Each attempt costs the above Creds in parts and if the set has previously been turned it's possible to totally de-tune the entire set if the new attempt results in a lower roll than the previous one. The Tech must be informed of the tuning order of the items, generally the PSU and primary weapon are first follow by other surging equipment then std S.L.O.T items. Once the roll is made subtract 10 and divide by 3. This is the total number of items in the order of the turning list that are now turned and protected from glitches.
Hardened Items wont glitch and a glitch cannot spread to other equipment. If damaged there functionality is reduced if severely damaged they simply shut down.
It's more difficult to hack hardened equipment while it is part of a tuned set. The Target number is +10.
It takes 10mins per slot to hardened a set of equipment, A Tech-Head would normally charge around 300 creds per hour up front, regardless of the outcome.