Hello, So I started to playing in rogue trader as a navigator. Also we have in party Explorator (Tech priest), Seneschal and the fighter Aeldar and after playing awhile I started getting some... not a trouble, but rather a questions:

1 What is my role in the party? I mean Seneschal always trying to find some stuff, Explorator is our doctor and a tank, Aeldar can talk to other aeldairs and so on... And I can do nothing. I have a biggest perception and, maybe, the second biggest (after explorator) intellegent, but how can i apply it? Only by rolling awareness and psynisence and by collecting the bunch of lores?

2 What is my roleplaying model? I mean often the navigators is the guys who just locked in their navigation cabinet and they not often appear to the other crew, aeldar, for example, is interested in the learning the Imperium culture and what about me, why I should leave the ship with other party?

3 What stuff is the useful for navigators? Explorator is searching for rare augmentics, aeldar searching for aeldar weapons, Seneschal searching for the weapons, xenotech etc. What should want Navigator? My BS ans WS is low so I'm not a great warrior, for augmentic i think useful is cybernetic eyes/ears for Heightened Senses and bonus for awareness cortex and actually is it all?

1. Look at this in-Universe. There are 2 cases.

1a. Ship action. Navigator's job is mostly obvious, whether as a primary Warp Guide or (likely at the start) a trainee used for less-critical shifts and acting as an intermediary with Lord-Captain. But also, cool detection capabilities (Void Watcher, Tracks in the Stars), precognition bonuses, and if you have The Navis Primer, there's "New Navigator Shipboard Actions" section in addition to New Navigator Powers and warp navigation rules.

1b. Personal action. Navigators are very non-expendable personnel. If RT includes one in the Away Team #1, it's for specific advantages. Specific advantages of the Navigator are known:

• Awareness of the Warp (Warp Sense, Gaze Into The Abyss) — early warning vs. some Very Bad News (possessions, sneaky psykers/sorcerers, Warp-tainted objects) before they become obvious for everyone else.
• Limited precognition (Foreshadowing, The Course Untravelled, Tides of Time and Space, Warp Vigil).
• Freaky powers (Lidless Stare, Held in My Gaze, Evil Eye). Sometimes very good, if situational. When you'll run into something like sandslime, everyone will be very glad you can bludgeon it with powers ignoring AP and TB.

2. You are Navigator, you get to chart your own routes. ? That said, Navigator Houses has their own styles and quirks, those are described, so look into this.

3. Survivability first. Other than this, depends on campaign and specializations.

• If there's no proper Void Master pilot who will go Ace route, Navigator can make a pretty good pilot as well. In which case MIU obviously is a great investment.
• Fighting happens, yes. Look at it this way: your Navigator would not be equal to a combat specialist anyway, but at hosing down invisible stuff with blessed bullets probably will be better than those for whom it remains invisible. With low BS you'll need extra bonuses (full auto + motion predictor, or Accurate + targeter for single shots). You need whatever hits land to count, thus bolter, or maybe Thollos Autopistol, if GM allows toys from IHB. Or at least combat shotgun with flechettes.

2. Navigators are some of the most pompous people in the Imperium because they understand just how vital they are along with the fact that they're sanctioned mutants, and they're nobles. They are generally only persuaded by the insinuation that they can't handle a task or a mountain of flattery. Navigators aren't locked anywhere, they go where they please and choose to be exactly where they want to be, they'll leave the ship if they Throne well please to leave the ship and very little is going to stop them.

3. Generally in a lore sense they might be searching for new warp routes.

16 hours ago, Redrih said:

What is my role in the party?

Part scholar, part diplomat, part noble, part space wizard. Seneschal, Explorator and Tech Priest all get good intelligence, but they have access to slightly different lores (and most lores really, really need you to have the specific skill). Navigator powers are unique and - as noted - very useful at personal scale as well as on board a ship. Psynicience can save lives in some situations, and you can be quite an effective helmsman for the ship if there's no void-master (arguably even if there is - Tactical Positioning is a very good ability). Generally stuff to do with other ships, imperial nobility and adeptus, and charted space are your forte, I think. So whilst you may not run the spies, you're one of the people who can make sense of what they report.

Say your Rogue Trader is in a trade war with another rogue trader dynasty. The seneschal's spies provide a report, a few weeks or months old old, from one of their holdings in the expanse of what ships were there. You are the one going to be using Navigate (Warp) and Common Lore (Koronus Expanse) to figure out where they are now , which is critical for battle planning.

Navigator houses are big, and powerful, but not so big and powerful that when you're dealing with another Rogue Trader Dynasty, you can't realistically find out about the warp guide of that ship. Which means you know who their allies are, who their enemies are, how good they are at their job, and what warp routes in the expanse they have access to charts of.

There are rivalries and wars between navigator families that are, in their own way, on a much larger scale to those of Rogue Trader Dynasties. There are formalised rules for navigators duelling to settle affairs of honour (duelling with navigator powers like The Lidless Stare, I should point out, so you're the only one who can do this), which - if an 'insult' or 'offence' can be manufactured, might give you the possibility of removing a senior navigator working for a rival.

16 hours ago, Redrih said:

What is my roleplaying model?

Whatever you want. But: you're not just 'the guy who steers the ship', anymore than an explorator is 'the guy who fixes the engines' - you are representatives of the Navis Nobilite and the Adeptus Mechanicus respectively. They are massively powerful organisations and wealthy to the point that your family's paterfamilias (not, sadly, you), the Novator, or the Archmagos of the explorator's home forge world, could probably buy most of the Rogue Trader Dynasty's assets out of pocket change.

A Navigator House wants much the same thing a Rogue Trader Dynasty wants - influence and profit.

In the case of Navigators, this comes from having your family's scions hired for service aboard the ships of wealthy and powerful influential factions: the Navy, Rogue Trader Dynasties, Chartist Fleet Syndicates, whatever.

Therefore your overarching goal is to sustain and increase this, by:

• Not screwing up at your job such that the Rogue Trader wants to seek another house to provide his Warp Guide!
• Acquiring a stake in profitable ventures by the Dynasty (you can probably get the house to commit resources for the right investment - represented by a chunk of achievement points to an appropriate objective with some heavy strings attached)
• Persuading the Rogue Trader's allies to hire your house's scions (or their allies)
• Discrediting and/or removing other house's representatives on other ships via character (or actual) assassination
• Making your house's scions 'more marketable' by acquiring charts of warp routes - either by charting them yourself, buying or stealing them. The same goes for artefacts which might assist with navigating the warp - the coolest of which tend to be slightly heretical.
• Reduce the impact of the Navigator Gene on the stability of your houses' bloodline - this is primarily going to be an issue of genetic bio-tech or chymistry, and archeotech or xenos tech along that line is....often technically illegal but worth acquiring if you can do it discretely.

17 hours ago, Redrih said:

What stuff is the useful for navigators?

Bodyguards, if you don't think you're much of a warrior. Remember the scale Rogue Trader operates at. If you're not confident in your ability to protect yourself, a cadre of half a dozen oathsworn bodyguards isn't actually that hard to acquire.

Also; to go to town on the 'warp routes':

Understand that the navigational logs and rutters showing the warp route between two systems are priceless data for a navigator house. Even if multiple houses all have routes between two star systems, they'll probably be different, and one might be faster, another safer, another more stable and less prone to the influence of storms. All long routes might pass through one or more systems in real space, but one route might pass a habitable world where the ship can make good warp damage and reprovision. Any of these might be 'the best' in a given set of circumstances, so there's an argument for wanting all of them.

And even if a rival house's route is categorically 'worse' than yours, knowing the details is still worth it, as that's how you translate raw data from spies (the bill of lading, listing what supplies the ship did - and didn't - load, in what quantity, before departing) into actionable intelligence (where the heck is it going, and when will it get there?). Plus, for the nefariously inclined, detailled charts of a route tell you in what systems a ship would stop over, and where in any given system it's likely to exit the warp...

Equally, don't forget that whilst navigator house are at each other's throats (every listed navigator house in the Navis Primer starts with a rival or enemy talent for at least one other house...), they do still have to consider the interests of the Navis Nobilite as a whole, just like an Inquisitor is still an inquisitor no matter what faction they claim to represent.

The Navigators are mutants. Furthermore, they're mutants in a society where " Know the Mutant; Kill the Mutant " is probably a popular primary school song (complete with sing-along track and cheery anime arbites/sororitas purge-teams). Finally, they're not just low-caste mutant slave labour like sepheris secundus or kalidar.....no....They're entire thousand-year bloodline families of mind-warpingly rich , massively influential mutants who sit right at the heart of Imperial politics and live lives of exceptional luxury. It wouldn't take much for things to go very wrong for the Navis Nobilite as a whole - yes, all right, they're crucial for the Imperium but so are psykers and they get the cruddy end of the stick their entire lives.

As a result, navigators are a clannish bunch and no matter how much one house may hate another, they'll stick often together against non-navigators. Preserving the legal privileges of the nobilite as a whole outweighs any one individual (to the extent of providing promising navigator scions to the inquisition and assassinorium who are essentially servitor-ised), and preserving bloodlines takes precedence over most other things - if a ship is being captured or destroyed, it's not unheard of for the ship's navigator to surrender to the other ship's navigator in particular, and for the latter to take responsibility for their safe conduct, and duels and wars are often not fought to extermination; with the victors taking steps to preserve viable strains of the defeated house's bloodlines (that in practice this generally involves the victors helping themselves to the prettier and less visibly mutated daughters of the vanquished novator is just a personal bonus for the individual nobilite involved).

Archeotech or Xenotech that can aid navigation is one thing, but devices which could replace a navigator are quite another - Path of Heaven tells you amongst other things how the Navis Nobilite react during the heresy when they become aware of the Imperial Webway programme....

i too think that the navigator is the least playable of the classes. yet there is still a lot of stuff that can be played out. all of what was said above is true. you want to leave the ship? you do it. demand a bodyguard from your RT. some slaves as pleasure company? "get me some!" a navigator can be loads of fun. combatwise, depending on the "stares" you choose, you can be highly effective to completely useless though
in the group i play in only the navigator comes remotely close to the destructive power of my missionary. on navis primer there are pretty usefull support abilities for navigators in ship combat.

the most important information i got though, is that you picked a class in which you dont understand what is expected from you. maybe if you talk to your gm about feeling out of place, and unable to support the group appropriately, maybe he can help.