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Navigators have three eyes. One of them is in their forehead. If you look into this third eye, your soul will be ripped from your body, thrown into the warp where daemons will tear it appart and you will die a slow and agonizing death and all that. My question is, has the Imperium every tried to weaponize this? If not, why not?
Belexar wrote:Navigators have three eyes. One of them is in their forehead. If you look into this third eye, your soul will be ripped from your body, thrown into the warp where daemons will tear it appart and you will die a slow and agonizing death and all that. My question is, has the Imperium every tried to weaponize this? If not, why not?
Navigators are too valuable a resource to have them carted around the battlefield to look at people.
There are some who walk until their legs fail them and they fall to the ground. I find that respectable.
Then there are those who drag themselves further. I find that admirable.
Descriptions of the warp-eye's actual effects are highly inconsistent, it's also been written that those who stare into it die of fright or go insane, for instance.
To answer your question, I suspect a good justification for why the Imperium haven't endeavoured to exploit the eye's side effects would be that the technology employed to engineer the Navigators' stable mutation was lost in the Age of Strife, and that the Navigators of the 41st millennium are both valuable, scarce and sensible enough not to let themselves be dragged around battlefields to stare at the enemy.
Red Hunters: 2000 points Grey Knights: 2000 points Black Legion: 600 points and counting
The Navigator families are way too full of themselves to deigne to be assassins for the Imperium. Your average aristocratic navis nobilite is probably worse than a depraved planetary govenor with their "better than you" attitude. =P
Navigators may be the most important people in the Imperium. They're not going to waste them on being assassins, especially when they already have Assassins.
Belexar wrote:As I said before, they could be used as assassins, not as soldiers, right?
Let's say one in a billion people are born as navigators. What are you going to have them do? They could either kill people, which frankly the Imperium has plenty of folks trained to do already; or they can guide ships through the warp with their unique talents. It's easy to tell which is more valuable.
Belexar wrote:As I said before, they could be used as assassins, not as soldiers, right?
Not really. It's not like they shoot fricking laser beams from their head. As an assassin, they'd need to get close to the target, take off whatever they have covering their warp eye, and then get the target to look at it. If you have a high profile target you need to kill, which is going to have a better chance: the shapeshifting killer, or the guy who isn't going to be able to get past the gunservitor making everyone check their hats before entering the warlord's palace?
Coolyo's right. Check Soul Hunter for confirmation of that. And as already stated, Blood Reaver (both books by Aaron Dembski-Bowden) gives some good information on why killing people with the third eye is not good business sense.
coolyo294 wrote:Read Blood Reaver to see why killing people with the Navigator's Third is a very, very bad idea.
Damn it. Now I'm intrigued. I'm guessing Daemons?
Also, doesn't it have to be direct eye contact, a bit like Medusa? Astartes can look on it with their helmets on, and I'd guess it's the same for Tau.
Only look into the spoiler if you want to know what happens. It's not major but still.
Spoiler:
Octavia, a Navigator taken by the Night Lords accidentally kills one of her attendants when he enters the room whilst she was unprepared. The attendant collapses, writhing on the floor and foaming at the mouth. Later, when she is walking around the ship, she enters the Apothecarium with another attendant. A dead Space Marine that was kept in a cold storage locker for geneseed harvesting is possessed by a minor Daemon. Another Space Marine arrives and kills it. Apparently, killing someone with a Navigators eye attracts Daemons when in the Warp.
When Octavia is first captured, Talos, the main character essentially, looks straight at her with his helmet on. However, he knew the dangers involved with a Navigator's powers so hunted her using sound, and kept his eyes closed throughout.
Red Hunters: 2000 points 
Grey Knights: 2000 points 
Black Legion: 600 points and counting 
