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I just started my first Rogue Trader campaign, which is also my first stint into the world of gming. I've been a player for a long time, but mostly D&d and a bit of mutants and masterminds. My first combat encounter for rogue trader, I didn't really know what would be balanced, so the six of them fought three enemies with stats of navy officers and three enemies with stats of thugs with pump-action shot guns. The first round, the navy officer shot the astropath in the head, twice on semi-auto mode with his naval pistol and put him right into the first critical damage level. The rest of the party then mulched the rest of their enemies will gleefully laughing at the critical damage 8-10 results that they were inflicting. Over all, they breezed straight through the encounter, so i know i need to beef things up to challenge them, but I can't help but think that in one round the astropath went right into critical damage, from a very easy encounter. Now, he is a squishy little psyker, but i'm worried that if i scale things up in combat, the party may be challenged, but i risk randomly one-shotting someone in the first round. I want combat to be dangerous, but i was thinking more three-shot kinda fatality, not sudden death mode. They are first rank, and relatively low powered, i guess. Any help?

Rogue Trader is a bit of an odd game. I'd say to run it, you've got to get rid of your preconceptions about the "whole party" fighting. Generally, in my campaign, the Arch Militant handled such petty affairs as combat, with the Trader, Astropath and others lurking in orbit or in relative safety behind a wall of meatshield deck security.

The few times they were in combat, everyone but the arch militant was pretty worried, hiding behind cover and so on. Firearms mean that pretty much anything can be a threat if the players aren't wearing power armour (something my players wisely invested in for the Arch Militant as early as possible).

The challenges in Rogue Trader are much more diverse and also much more epic in scale than other games. They don't fight encounters with 5 dudes, they fight battles with 5 ships, each with crews in the thousands. The Astropath and other non combat orientated characters have vital roles, but they won't be very effective if you force them to participate in combats.

I will say, Rogue Trader is the weirdest and most difficult to "balance" game I've ever played. You've got to totally rewire your GM sense.

Well, I have a fairly unwired gm sense to begin with, i suppose, so it could be worse. My next combat encounter will either be fighting a ton of thugs along with a pair of brutes with heavy stubbers and a sniper in a star bay, or against a horde of strange xenos attacking their ship's external components. However, i forgot that my players have a bazillion disposable mooks to fight for them, so i think i will need to scale these up significantly. Unfortunately, all of my players enjoy combat, so i don't want to let the arch militant have all the fun.

Remembering the "army" side of things (ie. that the players have piles of crew) is quite important. I also found playing up the dangers of warp travel and the importance of communication were really helpful in establishing tone. Our Astropaths were all NPCs, and they tended to go splat with alarming regularity.

About scaling things up, I'd generally abstract that quite heavily. Let the players be the "stars" of the battle and run their bits properly, but the rest should just be "scenery" perhaps adjudicated as you see fit by some representative dice rolls. I also strongly recommend looking at the Horde rules from Deathwatch and Black Crusade, and thinking about Morale in big fights- this can help increase the player's effectiveness and speed combat along. For example the Astropath could be quite successful at attacking enemy morale even if they wouldn't be much use directly attacking the mooks themselves. Another point to perhaps consider is that trained psykers are a valuable resource, so unless he was hideously dangerous perhaps many foes would prefer to capture him rather than kill him.

What sort of ship have they got?

A pimped-out Hazeroth raider, all the bells and whistles. Murder servitors, warpsbane gellar field, trophy room, extended supply vaults, basically everything. The ship is haunted and has blasphemous tendencies.

Sweet! Hah, my players ended up with a Hazeroth Class too. They also ended up with Blasphemous Tendancies I think. They had a tenebro maze, but later ships of there's had the extended supply vaults and so on.

Good times. Rogue Trader is a crazy game.