How common among the endless Green Tide are their Weirdboyz? I ask because I am finally trying to hammer out the details for a weapon I've had in mind for a few years now; the psi-lance. For pointless explanation, the psi-lance is an attempt to, in some small measure, duplicate the powers of a warp cannon (think the armaments of an Awakened Blackstone Fortress). While it certainly isn't on par with that august armament, the mechanism harnesses the combined power of a choir of battle psykers to loose a tightened beam of warp energy that will carve through most anything in its way. It is the prototype, mounted within the prow mount of my Oberon-class Battleship, the Emperor's Deliverance, adrift in space for a millennium, or more.

So, where the Weirdboyz come in is that I don't know how else I might flub the weapon. I have no idea how powerful an ABF's warp cannons would be in RT, and I'm not going for a totally cheesy OSK gun vs a starship, but I want some REAL punch. Da Wurldbreaka has a "similar" weapon emplacement, in the form of their Dorsal Weirdboy Towerz. I could easily copy-paste something like that, but the question is, aboard that Ork vessel, how many Weirdboyz would it take? If the mechanism explodes, as it had rules for happening, even rebuilt, Morgaash would have to round up that many Weirdboyz, again, or be short a weapon. I'm sure some of it is also not just the number of Weirds, but also the other Ork's Waaghing them up, but some guess would help. I know 10 Human Psykers shouldn't be very powerful, but a number estimate to duplicate it would be nice. Thanks.

Ork Wierdboyz are supposedly rarer than human psykers but also tend to be more powerful - the proportion of 'useful' psykers (as opposed to throne-kibble) is probably about the same.

Certainly, finding a few wierdboyz wouldn't be difficult, especially on orky pirate fleets where they seem to pull double duty as navigtor-equivalents.

More importantly, even relatively few wierdboyz could work as the core of a 'Waaaggh!-lance' - much (most) or an ork's psychic power comes from drawing off the aura of raw orkyness from da boyz in his vicinity, and whenever he's needing to fire the cannon, an ork capital ship represents several tens of thousands of boyz all spoiling for (or currently in) a fight, which would supply all the Waaaggh! power he needs. Or, make his head explode*.

For human psykers, of course, this is going to be more of a problem - finding a dozen or so alpha-level psykers is much, much harder (and more dangerous).

* An occupational hazard for most wierdboyz.

The psi-lance has a crystal thing in it, that can focus and amplify the beam, so I don't think I'm needing a dozen PR 6+ guys, and the "blowing it up" rule the Ork weapon has is getting replaced with "on a roll of X or more damage, one of the Psykers suffers a Perils of the Warp roll." Something like that. Still, I'm not sure if the lance would need a dozen, or a hundred psykers to harness enough power to care. I've seen fluff of really powerful psykers crushing smaller tanks with their minds, and several weaker ones, in concert, might be able to do something similar, but this isn't a tank; it's a 3 km long ship we're firing at. Hence my problems.

Are they orks, or humans?

If the latter, you are going to need a lot, or some really powerful ones, to meaningfully affect a starship.

They're human, most certainly... Really makes me sad when things get this hard. Oh well, I'll hammer out something. It seems so weird that the Imperium can build a gizmo that tears warp holes (any vortex device), but people who use the warp can't do the same, even in concert. The Jovian Nova Cannon keeps looking more plausible, just because it already exists.

Psykers are always exactly as hard to come by as the story demands. Some stories feature exactly one psyker. Other stories have psykers like candycorn. This makes sense in-universe both because psykers are sensitive to fate so all of them showing up in the plot is just the Warp pushing them into interesting times, and also because lots of environmental factors influence psyker-rates.

Venkelos, why don't you say that for each 20 psy rating accumulated (from the psyker's group you are putting together), you can deal 1d10 damage?

But each of them must go through 1d5 weeks of training before learning how to trust their psyke power into the lance's conduits.

It should also strain the gellar fields, which will need to be active so that the warp energies channeled are contained within the gun's barrels and does not create phenomena everytime the gun is shot.

(so, on a 95-99 the gellar field together with lance would be damaged, on a 100 the lance is destroyer, gellar field damaged and a portal to the warp is open inside the gun's deck)

It seems so weird that the Imperium can build a gizmo that tears warp holes (any vortex device), but people who use the warp can't do the same, even in concert.

They can. But the telekenisis/codex power Vortex of Doom is...what?...a couple of metres across? It's a devastating antipersonnel attack, but to project a vortex big enough to do tactically significant damage to a warship would involve an increase of scale by a factor of a hundred or more. Equally, you need to be flinging said power kilometres (or ideally tens of or hundreds of), so the same applies. Normal psykers can't do things on that scale.

By a straight read across of that psychic power, creating a vortex cannon useful in space combat would require a boosted-up/combined 'choir' psy rating in the hundreds; i.e. several hundred nailed-to-the-wall slaves (of the 'thrown to the hollow mountain' style) and/or a couple of dozen beta and alpha level psykers.

Getting hold of them is going to be very hard, but do-able with the right investment. Depending on your..err..philosophical leanings?...using chained daemonhosts might be able to generate the required levels of power much more easily than 'normal' humans.

Of course, you can cheat. Not all that power has to come from the psykers. I'd still say you require at least a dozen decent psykers, but one perfectly in-canon way that the weapon might function is to draw the warp energy in itself, using the psykers as capacitors and control/focus elements. Humanity couldn't build one, but a human being nailed into a crystalline matrix and flooded with destructive warp energy sounds very Yu'Vath. If one can acquire shard batteries then I guess with sufficient ingenuity, money and low morals, obtaining a salvagable Yu'Vath planetary defence gun might be quite possible. Which - if you've got the GM's kit - means you even have stats for it; use the Whisperer's keel lance-analogue thing.

Sadly, no GM kit. I wonder if I could just flub/cheese it that the weapon is focused through the weapon mount, and connected directly to the warp engine. The engine is charged up, and the lance beam "fired" as the engine "pulses". The resultant beam, upon hitting another ship, tries to force the vessel into the warp, sort of like a vortex weapon, or if they had tried to activate their own warp drive. The pulse isn't strong enough, of course, but the resultant flux causes considerable damage to the target, as part of it begins to phase away, and then reappear.

To give such a powerful weapon some drawbacks, as it is attached directly to the warp drive, if the lance is taken out by battle, the backlash could disable the warp drive, leaving the ship stranded (possibly a hollow victory, at that point), while another complication could cause an unguided warp jump of the attacking ship, rather than firing the lance. If the Gellar field wasn't on, it could lead to real crap, but even if it activates, there's no telling where you might end up, flung across the void by an unguided warp jump.

This way, I suppose I can drop out the psykers, altogether, and not have to worry about carrying a Black Ship's worth of possible daemon doors. The Daemonhost that attacks the Emperor's Deliverance could as easily appear as a result of the warp lance's malfunction, as it could popping out of one of the psykers in the choir (who are now absent, I guess.

I'd still leave at least one decent psyker in. You may have to replace him frequently but a mind is a good thing to put in the circuit somewhere when firing a massive lightning arc of warp energy.

Yeah....linking the misfire/damage into the warp drive has a nicely characterful effect but one far more easily contained without a total party kill. Probably....

Just read Ahriman: Exile . I wish to modify the statement in my previous post.

Most human psykers can't do things on that scale.

Holy crud Azhek Ahriman is scarily bad-ass.