To reiterate my earlier point - astropaths do not just telepathically communicate over vast distances - that's more the realm of Eldar Farseers and Space Marine Librarians, heck even Psychic Inquisitors of great power!

Instead the astropaths of the Imperium are a combination of communication network (their psychic ability being honed to send and recieve messages over incomprehensibly vast stellar distances by piggy backing on eachothers abilities) ciphering system (the messages are sent as images, metaphors and concepts not as literal alpha-numerics) and deciphering systems (complex training regimens allow messages to be deciphered at point of recieving, or passed onto senior astropaths for further deciphering if their ability or security clearance isn't good enough).

Indeed!  it seems to me that only astropaths at the sector-command level (i.e. the top astropaths in a sector) would have the ability, training, experience, skill, and security clearance to pull off direct, 'verbal' telepathic intragalactic communication (like the librarians, as Kasatka has indicated).  At the common lower levels, (vast) choirs of astropaths transmit, receive, code, and decode the mass of 'lesser' interstellar communications, which are metaphored and coded and cyphered.

And as fer Chaos…..the soul-binding ought to secure the astropaths from generalized corruption….but psyker powers *are* Chaos…..not hard to imagine that a demon of Tzeentch or Slaanesh might be listening to the soul-echoes on the warp-tides and cunningly decoding a vital secret or two…..but, being chaotic, they may not be able to make full use of it……

lurkeroutthere said:

The Dark Heresy Rulebook also says that astropathic comunication is exremely vague. My question is, does this come from established 40K fluff? I'm not going to go digging through all of my Black Library books, but I could swear that I've read examples of word-for-word astropathic messages in canon sources, like the Gaunt's Ghosts novels…

I don't believe the claims that the typical Librarian is better at sending/receiving astropathic messages than an Astropath Transcendent. For most Librarians it might be a useful power to develop, but it's not their focus. OTOH, for almost every AT, it's their primary purpose.

The Navis Primer has rules for intercepting (and changing!) messages, and states that hostile psykers (Farseers, Sorcerers, etc)  are capable of doing so. There's a difficult check to decipher them, but it can be done.

well that was some of the point of my post without semireliable interstellar communication the empire just couldn't function but for some reasin they are really in love with the concept of astrotelepathy being really mystical when on a macro level in order for things to work it would have to be fairly mundane.

lurkeroutthere said:

It reminds me of the 'classic' period of BattleTech when ComStar ruled the interstellar communications unopposed. They added mysticism to the process despite there being no real need to do so. In the case of Astropaths, there is at least some support that the mysticism and rituals improve the ability to perform the task. Astrotelepathy is going to be widely used, but I don't think anything involving the Warp is supposed to be mundane (much like voidship travel is not mundane). That Astrotlepathy has a high risk of 'dropped calls' and other problems - including operator failure in some cases - says that it's not entirely reliable. Of course, none of the other forces of the galaxy (not even the Eldar) seem to have flawless interstellar communications either.

lurkeroutthere said:

Except in those self same novels, while the message is eventually spat out as plain text, it's up to the Astropath to determine the content of the message by interpreting the vision they are sent.

That's something that appears all over the place, though the best backup is in The Outcast Dead, since half the book is about Astropaths.

edit: oh, already covered, that'll teach me for not reading the whole thread…

new post, cause the forum's edit feature sucks

Zoombie said:

There's still a light-speed lag within a solar system. For example, it takes 6 whole minutes for the light of our sun to reach our planet. So ships trying to communicate via laser link (setting aside how you'd even aim it right), or vox would still suffer from a communications lag unless they were within relatively close proximity to one another.

Astropathic communications, while marginally dangerous, are an altogether better option if you want to run real-time communications.

HappyDaze said:

It's more because Librarians are chosen as much for their raw power as they are for their worthiness of becoming a Space Marine. The Astartes and the Inquisition pretty much seem to get the first pick off the Black Ships, with everyone else getting to sort through those deemed unsuitable for whatever reasons. And no, this doesn't necessarily contradict anything written in the fluff. The psykers getting herded off to be fed to the Emperor or Astronomicon get the shaft because they're too weak to be safe, or of any other use. But in general, one can assume that the very cream of the crop, best and brightest, come to the scrutiny of those two groups before anyone else.

lurkeroutthere said:

Really? I'm sorry but is there anything simple about the real world global telecommunications network? Hundreds, maybe even thousands of sattelites all linking the phones, internet, gps, and other marvels together in to one huge system. Yeah, so simple there.

Just because of the mystical trapping of Astrotelepathic communications, the need to interpret the visions that other Astropaths are, sending, etc.. Well for one it's a warp-based system, and anything involving the Warp is going to be wonky no matter what. It only has to be mundane for the people who are reading the end result, which has to be decoded from the Astrotelepathic message. What is so overwhelmingly complex about this concept that it causes the feasability of a galaxy wide empire to crumble? The Astropaths are all working from the same cipher, they have relay points, so a message does not lose the strength of its signal, travelling accross the galaxy. Your disbelief, because you didn't do a very good job of explaining it, seems to come down to "visions are silly".

The problem with Astropaths is that they have to UNDERSTAND the message completely before sending it! So you need to tell them the actual unencoded message, so they can then translate it into a cypher.  If you don't understand why this is an INNATE HUGE SECURITY RISK… than, well, I can't help you…

Yeah, no they don't.

It has, in fact, been stated in several different places throughout the fluff, that an Astropath does NOT need to have to understand the content of a message, to transmit it.

Blood Pact said:

I grant that Librarians tend to be among the more powerful psykers, but I still say that Astropath Transcendents should far exceed them in ability where Astopathic communication is concerned. The Librarian has his focus on battlefield psychic powers, all manner of lores, and on the general super-killyness of being a Space Marine. That's a rather wide focus already, so I think giving the ATs one area in which they exceed the ability of Librarians is perfectly reasonable. I don't think any Librarian should be able to perform Astropathic communication on the level of an AT with a choir for backup because that's precisely what AT is literally made to do best.

I agree actually, and I think their form of communication is more specialized than what Astropaths primarily use, at any rate. If only because they are more varied in their powers, and often focused on the martial applications of them.

Without cracking open my books, I recall a psychic power where two pyskers can make a telepathic connection than transcends distance, which would go a ways to explaining things. And it'd be much less useful on a wider scale than the method of using Astropathic choirs.