A team of puppetbots is attacking an enemy position. During the order, they: Activate normally, with all three passing a coherency check End movement with both non-spearhead puppets within 8" of the spearhead puppet Receive AROs that result in the spearhead being rendered unconscious but not dead At the conclusion of the order, do the two non-spearhead puppets pass or fail their coherency check? Does the answer change if the spearhead had been killed (i.e. removed from the table)?
The coherency check is specified: Each Peripheral (Control) must observe the Coherency rule in regards to the Spearhead of their Control Unit. The player must perform a Coherency Check at the start and end of each Order or ARO. The end of order coherency check is essentially specified as the last possible thing that happens in the order: "The player must also check Coherency at the end of the Order, at the end of the Conclusion, after having performed any movement due to a failed Guts Roll or any other rule." Simply going unconcious isn't enough to remove the Spearhead marker from the selected puppet. Being dead is enough to remove the puppet from the table (and thus cause the other two puppets to break coherency). The good (or bad) news appears to be that if the spearhead gets killed, you can nominate someone else as the spearhead by spending an order, and the disconnected states will cancel at the end of that order. But you won't be able to nominate a new spearhead until you spend an order to activate that group. But having the spearhead end up unconscious is definitely better than dead.
My understanding is that you can also nominate a new spearhead in ARO, with the same coherency check at the end of that order. Correct? EDIT: didn't read far enough down! New spearhead per order only.