Editing Nobledark Imperium Imperial Forces (section)

==== Origin of the Astronomican ====

''"Only humanity would think to solve the complex and intricate issue of interstellar travel by building a giant psychic bonfire"''<br>
— Finarion, specialist bonesinger from Biel-Tan sent to examine the Astronomican, circa M31.

When the Great Crusade started, there wasn’t any need for an Astronomican. The Steward was a Man of Gold, originally designed to link human worlds together during the days of the Great and Bountiful Empire, and as a result was a fairly effective psychic landmark in his own right. Combined with the fact that the Imperium had access to the Void Borns’ maps and the knowledge of the relatively safe Warp currents, it was possible to reach many of the nearby systems using short (but very slow) warp jumps.

Having delegated most of the Legion running and Great Crusading to the primarchs, the Steward was free to try and figure out a long-term solution to the navigation issue. The Steward made no secret of this fact, and the primarchs didn’t complain about it because they themselves were starting to notice as they were getting further and further from Earth it was getting harder and harder to navigate. Indeed, some of the primarchs were actually trying to convince the Steward to stay on Earth, because if the Steward got killed it meant no Astropaths and the nascent Imperium would likely tear itself apart over succession crises, especially after the Steward was taken by surprise and nearly killed by a super-Ork on the nascent Attack Moon of Gorro.

The Steward hit upon the idea of the Astronomican when the Imperium had at least several hundred worlds under its belt. He found that if he could get the beacon started other psychics can maintain the “fire”, but it would take a lot of them working together and they'd have to rotate in shifts. Thankfully the Imperium is big enough now to provide those numbers. Unfortunately, while it wasn’t as dangerous at first, as the Astronomican grew in response to the need from the Crusade it becomes increasingly lethal and difficult to handle. The warp-flow goes "lumpy" and the lumps are dangerous proportional to the size of the "flame” you are trying to generate. Given that the flame is bright enough to see across lightyears, the lumps are pretty lethal.

When the alliance with the Eldar happened, the Eldar sent their specialists to Old Earth as part of the deal with humanity to look at the thing. Then they backed out of the hall slowly at the sheer insanity of what these mon-keigh were trying to do. The Eldar started attaching shock absorbers and buffering jars and shit to it, and the lifespan of resident psychics jumps up dramatically. Nowadays, maintaining the Astronomican is considered an actual job rather than a death sentence, albeit one with a greatly reduced quality and length of life even compared to baseline humanity. Eldar and human technicians continued to tinker with the Astronomican, adding more devices to it, like lenses and spectrum filters. And that's where the Astronomican is at now. It can't be tweaked any more, having hit the hard upper limit on what is possible with a single, giant psychic lighthouse.

Theoretically other alternatives are possible, and in hindsight it would have been easier to just make [[Imperium_Secundus#Mustering_Forces_to_Himself|a bunch of small lighthouses]] instead of one big one, in a similar vein to what the Great and Bountiful Human Empire did with the Men of Gold and likely what many other races did back during the Dark Age of Technology. Such devices would not only be more efficient, but would greatly — though not entirely — reduce the issues with the potential lethality of the job. Unfortunately doing so would require resources that the Imperium doesn’t have, either in the form of Iron Minds/Men of Gold or psykers that are desperately needed by the big Astronomican on Old Earth. And it it not possible to simply put out the Astronomican and start over, because the loss of the Astronomican, even temporarily, would be catastrophic for the Imperium.