Tony, you should take inspiration from m.dts and have tons of nodes that you can hide/unhide, every armor piece in 1 .dts. You only have to mount that one .dts then and hide the unequipped nodes.
You could also just make a new m.dts with extra nodes. (You could do interesting anims, visor up/down, perhaps animation to visualize the damage done to the armor)
I guess you could make individual hp values for each piece of armor and have an individual piece degrade when it's hit by a projectile.