Astropath powers don't have the range to reach other ships in combat, unless you have a Choir-Chamber.

But can you target someone that far away, aven with a chamber? how do you knwo you will target one of the Bridge-Crew, and not just a random crew member?

We'd rather not have one of our players sat around doing very little during ship combat - what are astropaths capable of?

Check Into the Storm, page 200 onward for a section on Astropaths and Navigators in Starship combat. Its very helpfull.

OK, after reading p200, it shows Astropaths can help in ship combat, especially if they have Divination.

I'm still unsure as to how much use a Choir-Chamber is.

Overall the Choir Chamber is designed to serve a Giant PSY Focus. Adding s bonus to the roll and increasing all ranges by 5 VUs. While the added range is not helpful for all powers, it become very helpful in others.

5 VUS will allow a Psyker to user Telepathic powers to talk to people on planets, other ships near by, etc.

Many powers in Theosophamy will benefit from the increased range, able to detect breaches in the warp at long ranges, close them, etc. Imagine fighting a Chaos Ship and the Astropath uses "Seal the Breach" To close and sever connections to the Warp for all Warp creatures in a 5vu radius... that seems very useful to me.

Get creative. While not all powers are useful ( you wouldn't be able to reach over and telekentic crush someone on another ship, unless you had a way to target them. ) But using Telepathic communication and image sending to relay detailed auspex scans of an enemy ship to the boarding party leader you just sent over could be very helpful indeed. (as it would bypass any Vox jamming and be very hard to detect.)

The key is to look at the power and go "Can it be used, can it be targeted and what would the increased range do" You have to follow the normal target rules of the power, so you could not blindly try to telekentic crush someone on the bridge, but if perhaps they established a Pict-corder link to taunt you....
Remember, all the rules normally apply, you have to be able to target them, use the power and be within range. In this case the Psykers range is huge. It should also make sense (as much as the Warp and Pyskers can make sense.)

Assuming your GM allows it, I'd say astropaths make pretty ideal candidates for performing Hold Fast- a telepathic message heard by everyone one the ship with a hint of complusion? That'd either work, or make a significant portion of the crew break.

Also, if you're having fun with Choir Chambers, try using a Domination power on the enemy crew- say Compel, or Puppet Master on the enemy's Drivesmaster and have him perform and emergency shut down of their plasma drive, or make the Infernus Master see fires in vital components, beyond hope of saving, and have him vent those compartments to space.

For that matter, you could have your Astropath get into the mind of one of the officers manning the Scutarium Clusters, and shut down the void shields covering the ship (or a particular area thereof)

Alasseo said:

The problem we're seeing with these techniques is being able to target the right mind.
Telling a Random Crewmen to shut down the Drives won't have much effect ...

Its not so much what fun we can have, but how we can make it work, with the rules.

This is a point, but all it basically requires is that the astropath spend a turn performing Mind Scan first- two successes should give enough information to make a best guess as to who to psychically lean on, especially if the Astropath has at least a basic knowledge of the layout of a starship (preferably the most common layout for that class of ship), which you could gain through having someone perform a Focused Augury, or being Void-Born, or having someone with Trade (Shipwright).

Alasseo said:

I feared Mind Scan would be required

The way I am reading the rules, it is a 300xp Technique.

Astropaths don't get 300 XP techniques until Rank 5.

We are probably not going to be playing beyond Rank 4.

It is possible to work around it via Divination powers- Augury or Divining the Future to get a True Name for whomever you want to mess with, then Psycholocation to find them, then whatever power you think best to ruin their day. This does mean it will take several turns to attack whomever, but still less than one round of starship combat. It also means that you'd have to spend two psychic technique slots just to finding your target (although they are pretty useful anyway).

This is where I would like to point out that it is indeed important to remember the targeting rules and to also remember, anything you can do to them, they can do to you. Imagine your Game Master using the same things against your ship and having to coup with them. Which is why its best things both make sense and are balanced. Remember, Void Ships have crews of 20,000 to 250,000+ There is a great deal of mental "noise" so picking one person out from that to target would be very difficult.

To be honest, I do not know if astropathic intervention at ship versus ship combat is possible on a 'massive' scale. The distances are enormous and the power needed to affect the minds of men within a ship many voidunits away seems to me to be beyond the power of man to do. Even daemons fuelled by the worst rituals of the powers of chaos would be hard pressed to achieve such results, let alone mere humans.

The most profitable intervention seems to lie in the fields of auguries. Together with the techniques described in 'Into the Storm' this gives a human psyker the ability to give quite a number of useful bonusses to ship versus ship combat. Or to do more, you might consider joining a specifically aimed hit and run action to get your psyker close enough to its targets.

Obviously, it is your game and your call. But psychic assaults from one ship to another seem to me more the stuff that belongs to Eldar, Chaos ships and obviously the Great Devourer. A human mind would crack under psychic power of such magnitude, even if aided by a psychic choir.

Friedrich van Riebeeck, Navigator Primus, Heart of the Void

In fairness, it has been done in fluff, and by a low Gamma/high Delta-grade psyker at that. Admittedly, he did have a massive psychic amplifier bringing him to Alpha, or Alpha-Plus levels on his own ship, and had arranged for a local booster to be attached to the enemy ship's hull, but he did manage to shut down the opposing ship's void shields and defensive systems psychically, and (so far as we know) without using a choir for backup.

Of course, that was Inquisitor Ravenor, and written by Dan Abnett, so it is up to you whether you count it as truly canon.

Well, I've been discussing it with my GM, and its looking like its not going to happen.

Even with a Choir-Chamber providing the range, targeting is still a problem, and its looking like 3 ship-rounds of Augury-Psycholocation-Power to attempt an effect, when he could be doing something useful for our ship!

Oh well, our Astropath will be disapointed.

Thanks for your input, guys.

BlackSpike said:

Oh well, our Astropath will be disapointed.

Being a space-phone is a generally disappointing experience, I've found.

Warhammer is dark fantasy for a reason. Being a psyker here is more of a curse then a blessing, which makes it so much more interesting then going for D&D magic.

FvR

Without wanting to dictate to your GM, it probably shouldn't take that long.

Going by the RAW, it shouldn't take more than 2 rounds of ship-combat for an astropath to go through a full Augury-Psycholocation-Power cycle: a single Round of structured time (so, one normal combat round, or a Full Action) takes roughly 5 seconds, while a Strategic Round of starship combat takes around 30 minutes.

Granted, Augury takes around half an hour to interpret and may take longer, but Psycholocation and (for example) Compel are both Half Actions, so after using Augury or similar, it should only take 10 seconds to give an order to someone on another ship (well, 5, but strictly speaking you can't use the same action twice in one Round, so the second/3rd Focus Power action should technically wait for a couple of seconds). I know that I'd allow someone to "cheat" and sneak those extra ten seconds into one Strategic Round, but I'm a big fan of the big psychic duels. The only major problem I have with inter-ship duels is it essentially requires you to dump 400xp-600xp into the character specifically for it, assuming you picked telepathic powers you could use on someone in combat during character creation.

All that said, if you are careful how you build your astropath, then you can pull it off in definitely under 1 Strategic Round by Rank 2 (Divining the Future is merely a Full Action with 1 minute interpretation time, although it does have Augury as a prerequisite).

A small side note on the fluff aspect (Dan Abnett's Ravenor): aside from fluff being fluff, and astropaths having been given a number of very useful actions for ship vrs ship combat (better then navigators when discounting their specific navigator abilities, for which they have to pay the XP and slot cost), the approach of Abnett to Imperial ships doesn't really fits the RT ideas. In the Ravenor novels the ships are small with crews of dozens instead of thousands. If I remember well the actions you described also happened as the ships were exchanging boarders, not slugging it out at many voidunits distance. Small ships within easy visual range and titanic void craft slugging it out at enormous distances are a very different thing.

FvR

Alasseo said:

This is the part where I want to just jump in and say my piece.

Starship combat is played in long turns with lots of actions. With that in mind, I would either ask for a targeting power roll followed by a damaging power roll in the same way as the ship's gunner rolls to hit and then to damage, or have them make one roll if they're doing something to assist another action. I totally would not want to get into a nitty discussion of how many regular actions a character "should" be able to take. Fighting spaceships is long, complex, complicated, messy business. Let the characters run with it.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled thread.