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Does anyone know who was minding the shop when the Emperor was not on Terra and therefore not at the wheel, so to speak, of the Astronomicon?

Well Malcador the Sigilite had to temporarily take over during the Seige of Terra final battle, well, it didn't turn out so well for him...

Any ideas?

Via pg 38 and 190 of The horus Heresy Collected Visions book it appears as though the Emperor used to be able to power the Astronomicon while still bounding around being full of awesome.

Later, after Magnus had caused the damage to the Web Way in the palace and The Emperor needed to start paying attention to it to keep it sealed it became needful to have the psyker sacrifices.

Malcdor was called upon so The Emperor could have his full might for the brawl with Horus.

I think the involved technology was damaged by magnus "warning".
The GT was the control panel for a lot of things and the emperor might not sit there before he went to terra and
work on his masterplan, including the installment of the throne.

The astronomicon could be independent in the early days of the crusade. But the enlargement of the imperial space may have
lead to more power-consumption, thus having the emperor as "power-up" seems a possible choice.

IIRC, the timeline is:

- crusade, astronomican used but independent
- emperor returns to teraa, creates webway and GT also control of astronomican is moved to GT
- HH result in emperor is bound to his "command chair"...

Since the crusade ships had all navigators, its save to assume the astronomican existed pre-heresy.
Because the emperor only focuses and guides the power of the astronomican, its also save to assume the astronomican may work
without the emperor but at a low power level.
We additionally know that black ships were pre-heresy too, SoS did the job the SoB have now..

So we got:
-psykers
-a structure not mentioned as destroyed or harmed in the HH
-some person who represents the adeptus... ( and the amount of non-SM characters is pretty low in pre heresy fluff )

I believe the emperor could leave the GT if:
- he could ( or wanted to )
- the webway yould be sealed shut
- the imperial ships could live with a reduced "beacon"

There is a duty for the Emperor. But even in pre-heresy the organizations had some leaders to act without Big E holding their hand.


Or put in a few words:

IDK

SO it is officially mentioned that the Astronomicon was independent of the Emperor until Magnus screwed up some of the mechanisms?

That does help, and make a certain amount of sense.

IIRC, this is one of the things that was left 'unexplained' in the 'old background'...

Thor665 wrote:Via pg 38 and 190 of The horus Heresy Collected Visions book it appears as though the Emperor used to be able to power the Astronomicon while still bounding around being full of awesome.

Later, after Magnus had caused the damage to the Web Way in the palace and The Emperor needed to start paying attention to it to keep it sealed it became needful to have the psyker sacrifices.

Malcdor was called upon so The Emperor could have his full might for the brawl with Horus.

Thanks, I have wondered about this for a while

Hmm. I'm confuzzled. People call it "webway" and in the books, it says that the emperor was preparing to invade the webway. But when magnus damaged it loadsa daemons came out.....and i'm pretty sure daemons cant come in the webway, otherwise the DE and normal Eldar would be in deep trouble...:?

Via pg 12 & 13 of the current Eldar Codex there is discussion of how there are many rents in the Webway some of which involve daemonic incursions. The Eldar have put wards and other protections on those areas to try and contain the deamonic troubles.

In a similar vein, probably the actions of The Emperor, his Custodians, and the Silent Sisterhood keep the Daemons at the Terra end of the Webway from popping out and causing too much trouble to the Webway in general - and those deamons at that end are probably focused on trying to get in and unplug the Golden Throne so as to deal with their supposed arch-foe the Emperor.

1hadhq wrote:The astronomicon could be independent in the early days of the crusade. But the enlargement of the imperial space may have lead to more power-consumption, thus having the emperor as "power-up" seems a possible choice.

This is a good point. If you assume the amount of energy necessary to power the Astronomicon to be proportion to its volume (or area), it's a huge difference.

If you assume the Astronomicon projects a Sphere (ie, a ball), then the volume is equal to 1.33 * Pi* Radius ^3 (cubed). Which means that a ball with twice the diameter (so, say, 1 foot across vs. 2 feet across), the volume is 8 times larger. Which means, if the Astronomicon was originally 100 parsecs in diameter, and it was enlarged to 200 parsecs in diameter, the volume is actually 8 times larger (523,533 cubic parsecs vs. 4,188,266 cubic parsecs). If it takes 1 unit of energy to power the astronomicon over a cubic parsec, then that's a huge difference in energy.

If you assume the Astronomicon projects for of a two-dimensional circle, it's not quite as bad. But, doubling the diameter increases the area by 4 times. For 100 to 200 parsecs, it'd be a difference of about 7,853 square parsecs to 31,412 square parsecs.

The actual shape of the galaxy is more like a flying saucer.

Earth is about 2/3rds of the way out from the middle.

If your astronomican field is at all malleable -- in other words if it can be shaped efficiently -- it could be projected only into the parts of the galaxy which need it.

However I don't think a psychic field works in the same way as a normal field such as radio. Otherwise, the Astronomican would be blindingly bright close to the Earth and too faint some way across the galaxy.

the emporerknew he was going to have to ascendto the throne and thus planned for magnus to take over the astronomicon duties but of coarse didnt happen.

The astronomicon is mainly pointed eastwards anyway, as most of the exploration et al was going on there, Terra being in the Galactic West and all

Kilkrazy wrote:The actual shape of the galaxy is more like a flying saucer.

Earth is about 2/3rds of the way out from the middle.

If your astronomican field is at all malleable -- in other words if it can be shaped efficiently -- it could be projected only into the parts of the galaxy which need it.

However I don't think a psychic field works in the same way as a normal field such as radio. Otherwise, the Astronomican would be blindingly bright close to the Earth and too faint some way across the galaxy.

It might. I say this because in the BRBs galaxy map and timeline, it says that contact with the planets Ultima Macharia is lord when the light of the astronomican grows dimmer, and contact is intermittent with Macragge and Cypra Mundi at best. If you look at the Galactic map, these planets are the furthest away from earth.

It can't be inverse square law.

To illustrate my point with maths, let's assume Macragge is 60,000 light years away from Earth and the power of the astronomican is a unit of 1 there, barely viewable by an Astrogator.

If you want to get within 50 light years of Earth, by the time you reach that distance the power of the Astronomican would be over 1,000,000, using the Inverse Square Law.

Perhaps astrogators have some immensely powerful filter they use to screen out the signal.

However, when you reach the Earth's orbit, the field strength would be about 12,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 units.

At that kind of power level, everyone with the slightest bit of psychic awareness would probably find their head exploding.

Alternative explanations are that the line about the astronomican fading is poetic licence, or perhaps that GW's writers didn't do physics O level.

Kilkrazy wrote:Alternative explanations are that the line about the astronomican fading is poetic licence, or perhaps that GW's writers didn't do physics O level.

Kilkrazy wrote:perhaps that GW's writers didn't do physics O level.

Kilkrazy wrote:GW's writers ... physics O level.

Kilkrazy wrote:GW's writers

I lol'd

But for all we know the astronimicon could be fading EVERYWHERE, or it might be beause of the Nids, or the C'Tan.

Kilkrazy wrote:It can't be inverse square law.

To illustrate my point with maths, let's assume Macragge is 60,000 light years away from Earth and the power of the astronomican is a unit of 1 there, barely viewable by an Astrogator.

If you want to get within 50 light years of Earth, by the time you reach that distance the power of the Astronomican would be over 1,000,000, using the Inverse Square Law.

Perhaps astrogators have some immensely powerful filter they use to screen out the signal.

However, when you reach the Earth's orbit, the field strength would be about 12,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 units.

At that kind of power level, everyone with the slightest bit of psychic awareness would probably find their head exploding.

Alternative explanations are that the line about the astronomican fading is poetic licence, or perhaps that GW's writers didn't do physics O level.

Isn't it only the Astropaths/Special Navigator guys who are aware of the astronomican? For example the Chaos Sorcerers need to use possessed, or daemonic entities to navigate. They have to go through a certain ritual IIRC to detect the astronomican...so maybe it's got a ward or something which stops other people using it? Just speculating

That's exactly the sort of thing you would expect from psychic powers, which are a kind of magic.

A radio beacon can be detected by anyone with a radio detector. If its signal is encrypted, enemies couldn't tell what its message was, but they would still be able to fix its position by triangulation. And if it was a very powerful beacon, transmitting on lots of frequencies, it would drown out other radio sources.

I don't see why a psychic beacon has to work like that at all. In fact by normal physics it wouldn't work, which was demonstrated by my post above. Not only that, but the signal sent out must be a very specific one, only detectible by astrogators. Maybe every astrogator has to be tuned to the astronomican signal personally, or something.

Kilkrazy wrote: Not only that, but the signal sent out must be a very specific one, only detectible by astrogators. Maybe every astrogator has to be tuned to the astronomican signal personally, or something.

Nice hint

Now, we have 2 different things:

-Communication using the warp
-Navigation using the warp

one of both binds the participants with a ritual...

1hadhq wrote:

Kilkrazy wrote: Not only that, but the signal sent out must be a very specific one, only detectible by astrogators. Maybe every astrogator has to be tuned to the astronomican signal personally, or something.

Nice hint

Now, we have 2 different things:

-Communication using the warp
-Navigation using the warp

one of both binds the participants with a ritual...

http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Navigator
According to this they have a special Navigator gene which allows them to detect the astronomican...maybe all the other psykers dont have the ability to detect it? Like a vox-caster trying to pick up heat radiation..with his vox caster

That's part of the psychic = magic continuum.

People don't have different genes, they have different alleles of the same gene.

I don't have the allele which lets people see green and red properly but I will still get blinded by a very bright red light.

We should admit to ourselves that like much else in 40K it works by the power of "Handwavium".

I think it's folly to try and apply physical constructs like "brightness" to abstract, fictional, psychic concepts like the Astronomican. It seems like "growing dim" is more of a poetic license used by those people who aren't navigators or astropaths to describe something they have no frame of reference for.

I also don't think the Astronomican is a sphere of influence per se, but more of a beacon. Something like 'I know the planet is X light years away from Terra so I need to place this ship Y warp units away from the astronomican'. This would be where the 3 major tiers of astronomican visibility come into play. Seems like it is either 1. easily detected 2. detected with difficulty or 3. undetectable.

As for the original topic, yes the Emp could originally galivant around the cosmos while keeping the beacon lit. Once Magnus buggered the webway it took so much of the Emp's psychic power to hold the portal shut that he didn't have enough left to run to the Astronomican properly AND had to sit on the Golden Throne (psychic amplifier apparently) to be able to do both as well as he did.

There is also the possibility that the signal doesn't drop off based on the inverse square law, but tapers in a different fashion. Possibly it's a combination of power (to keep the signal going) and distance? The better the Navigator, the better they can 'see' the signal despite interference, and the further distance they can get before sensing it becomes too unreliable. Sort of how some people have better night vision than others.

The blinding effect might be that most psykers don't spend a lot of time in the warp, since it is even more dangerous for them than most people. If you aren't in the warp, you can't see the Astronomicon. The Geller field may act like polarised lenses do to stop those close to Terra from getting blinded. Or they might be able to do whatever the mental equivalent of squinting is to lower the amount of 'light' from the beacon getting through, as they won't need their full senses to detect it at that range.