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The all-or-nothing aspect of saving throws just gets strange when it comes to weapons at the higher end of Strength and Damage stats. Even if lacking the Blast rule, a sufficiently powerful weapon would surely have some kind of splash effect. The Third Law of Newton will not be denied: to every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. When the missile or lascannon beam hits your opponent's force field, it will bounce, or briefly turn the air to white-hot plasma, or split the earth open beneath their feet.

And yeah, I know there has to be a balance between realism and excessive granularity of rules, but gameplay-wise it's also frustrating. Some tank-killing weapons (like the Shadowsword's volcano cannon and the Hekaton Land Fortress' heavy magna-rail cannon) get Devastating Wounds to help overcome invulnerable saves, but it's still an all-or-nothing rule relying on a wound roll of 6, for a weapon that has very few attacks to begin with. It feels woefully inadequate.

I have a simple idea, provisionally called Extra Damage. Other suggestions: Splash Damage, Collateral Damage, Shockwave, Overkill.

Weapons with [EXTRA DAMAGE X] in their profile are known as Extra Damage weapons. Each time a successful wound is rolled with this weapon, roll a number of dice as denoted by ‘x’. For each roll of 4+, the target suffers a mortal wound.

The Extra Damage number would always be flat, since the randomness comes from the 4+ roll (similar to the Grenades and Tank Shock stratagems). It would also be a fairly modest number, ranging perhaps from 1 (lascannon, meltagun, hunter-killer missile) to around 5 (some titan weapons). There's still a non-zero chance the target comes out unscathed, but an Archon's 2++ shadowfield can no longer reliably send the kinetic energy of a direct missile hit straight into a pocket dimension of the Webway.

As a bonus, this rule means that shooting a squad of infantry with a lascannon has a chance of mortal-wounding an extra model. Which just makes sense, as a weapon that can straight-up vaporize a guy can assuredly also kill the guy standing right behind him.

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Even if lacking the Blast rule, a sufficiently powerful weapon would surely have some kind of splash effect.

I'm not sure I agree with the premise. The 41st millenium has a lot of weird weapons, and not everything that's good at busting open a tank is necessarily good at killing whole swaths of marines or hordes at the same time. And being able to differentiate between high-damage single-target attacks and horde-clearing attacks that are less effective into durable targets is one of the levers I like that desingers are able to pull.

That said, running with the premise, I think an approach to this that would be less prone to wonky interactions would just be to give weapons that do "splash damage" something like a sweep profile.

I feel like the vindicator's demolisher cannon is a great example of this. We want it to be good at busting tanks. We want it to be good at blasting holes in hordes. It needs lots of Attacks to clear hordes, but we don't necessarily want it to get a ton of Attacks into tanks because then it risks being *too* good into tanks. So rather than the "compromise" approach it uses now where it has a randomized number of attacks and blast, you could just give it a "Strike" profile that's like, 1 attack with really good Strength, AP, and Damage, and then a "Sweep" profile that's as good at clearing hordes as you want it to be but at a way lower Strength, AP, and Damage. And then just let people use the profile that makes sense in each situation. Or I guess force them to use the sweep profile against non-vehicle targets if you feel it's necessary.

The Extra Damage rule as you've presented it has the downside of making anti-tank weapons even better at anti-tank when that's not necessarily your goal, makes all splash damage good at bypassing heavy armor when that's maybe the opposite of what you'd expect, runs into interactions with anti-mortal-wound mechanics that are often meant to be related to psychic effects, and is also just slightly fiddly.