Other than saying it is an art penned in handwavium, drawn on a matte of unobtainium, how does being an astropath work? You are part of a network of constantly moving messages, all across the galaxy; does that mean that, most of the time, your mind is like a blank jumping point, and messages you never receive personally just bounce off of you, re-energized, continuing to their intended destination, or do you have to constantly stop, reorder things, repackage it, and send it on its way? Are the bulk of the astropaths just passive elements in the system, or do they have to do more, constantly listening to the drone of the background noise I assume the Imperium can generate, since this is their only means of long-range communication? i don't know if they are glimpsing flashes of other people's messages while they sleep, are just off the net, or what.

It seems like the more I read on Astropath's the more convoluted it gets also it seems like the system really can't work as stated in the books or at least not without some sort of handwavium. Afterall the Imperium and it's constant war is a massive logistical nightmare which really isn't feasable without a high volume of reasonably reliable messaging.

Now having said that here's my personal theory on how Astropath's work. When you send a astropathic message you can will where it goes even if in a general sense, then in the actual message/header you can leave instructions for who or where it's for and whether or not it should be rebroadcast. Astropathic relay stations likely have pretty much the thankless job of rebroadcasting everything that's tagged to be rebroadcast and are often used as links in the chain. Because they are funded by the imperium however they likely only concern themselves with government traffic. If your a private citizen, I.E a rogue trader or say a high ranking (i.e. wealthy) military officer that wants to get a personal letter home you need to find an astropathic choir powerful enough to get your message to someone that will be willing to directly pass if not directly to the destination. Alternatively you could in the fine tradition of military comm officers everywhere, bribe, beg, borrow and steal some astropathic bandwidth.

Your standard ship's astropath especially PC's really need an NPC choir to have any reasonable hope of broadcasting back from the expanse, personally i'd eyeball this as an aquisition test or throw it in as more or less a gratis if the PC's actually spring for an astropathic choir chamber. That also allows you to have the NPC choir members having one Astropath on receive duty or for when an Astropathic distress call comes in.

When an Astropath wants to send a message, he or she must get into a trance to make the call. Receiving it seems to be as easy as just being a receptive telepath. A lot of energy and concentration is required to send out a signal, however receiving it is a passive action. So, when you need to relay a message, it just seems to be the matter of first receiving it before sending it away yourself.

Of course, you could have dedicated relay stations where the Astropaths are staying into a trance the whole time when they are on duty. That would make sense in densely populated sectors like Calixis. However, the Koronos expanse is still a frontier and I doubt that valuable Astropaths will be assigned to this task there.

Considering things this way, playing an Astropath becomes feasable. You can run around with your buddies and only need to bother playing the telephone whenever a message is to be send a long distance.