We study properties of double covers of P 3 ramified along nodal sextic surfaces such as non-rationality, Q-factoriality, potential density, and elliptic fibration structures. We also consider some relevant problems over fields of positive characteristic.A smooth sextic double solid is proved to be birationally super-rigid in [77]. Moreover, a smooth double space of dimension n ≥ 3 was considered in [110]. The birational superrigidity of a double cover of P 3 ramified along a sextic with one simple double point was proved in [113]. To complete the study in this direction, one needs to prove the following:Theorem A. Let π : X → P 3 be a Q-factorial double cover ramified along a sextic nodal surface S ⊂ P 3 . Then X is birationally super-rigid.As an immediate consequence, we obtain:Corollary A. Every Q-factorial double cover of P 3 ramified along a sextic nodal surface is non-rational and not birationally isomorphic to a conic bundle. Remark 1.3. Our proof of Theorem A does not require the base field to be algebraically closed. Therefore, the statement of Theorems A is valid over an arbitrary field of characteristic zero.One can try to prove the non-rationality of a sextic double solid using the technique of intermediate Jacobians (see [13], [128], and [129]), but it seems to be very hard and still undone even in the smooth case (see [22]) except for the non-rationality of a sufficiently general smooth sextic double solid via a degeneration technique (see [13], [36], and [138]).It is worth while to put emphasis on the Q-factoriality condition of Theorem A. Indeed, rational sextic double solids do exist if we drop the Q-factoriality condition.Example 1.4. Let X be the double cover of P 3 ramified in the Barth sextic (see [6]) given by the equation 4(τ 2 x 2 − y 2 )(τ 2 y 2 − z 2 )(τ 2 z 2 − x 2 ) − w 2 (1 + 2τ )(x 2 + y 2 + z 2 − w 2 ) 2 = 0 in Proj(C[x, y, z, w]), where τ = 1+ √ 5 2 . Then X has only simple double points and the number of singular points is 65. Moreover, there is a determinantal quartic 3-fold V ⊂ P 4