[N01H3r3]

When I say contain, I'm not talking about just throwing nothing but military might at the psyker. If you're containing a psyker, nullification and wards are not to be overlooked, and while a powerful psyker would have the power necessary to blow through such things, a weak one, even if controlled, wouldn't.

That really comes down to the difference between kicking down a metaphorical door, and picking the lock. Brute force will let you do the former, control gives you the latter.

[MarcoSkoll]

That really comes down to the difference between kicking down a metaphorical door, and picking the lock. Brute force will let you do the former, control gives you the latter.

Possibly. But if we're taking that metaphor and running with it, kicking down the door is much faster.

Still, I'm not saying that it's always the most important element in a situation, but that it usually is. There are times when control can prove a substitute for raw power, but that doesn't apply every time.

[Ynek]

That really comes down to the difference between kicking down a metaphorical door, and picking the lock. Brute force will let you do the former, control gives you the latter.

Possibly. But if we're taking that metaphor and running with it, kicking down the door is much faster.

Still, I'm not saying that it's always the most important element in a situation, but that it usually is. There are times when control can prove a substitute for raw power, but that doesn't apply every time.

In both cases, the speed of either kicking the door down or picking the lock is dependent upon the strength of the door (ricketty wooden door / Fort Nox vault door) and the complexity of the lock (simple latch versus 3,000 character digital lock).

But the point that I was trying to make earlier is that power is not the only attribute which makes a psyker difficult to capture/contain. The level of control that they have is every bit as important as their brute psychic strength. After all, you can't kick down the door if you don't have the capability to control the power to tell it to break down the door. Your power might be more contented to make the walls bleed, make your voice sound all spooky and boomy, and to make phantom puppies appear and die all round you instead of actually breaking the door.

[precinctomega]

You're all being very nice about my proposed system.  But I can't remember it.  Has anyone got a copy or can anyone remember how it worked, precisely?

R.

[Inquisitor Cade]

I never really got the saftey facet of the three number system, I'd have thought that safety would be dependent on  the other two ( proportional to control, inversly proprotional to power) and not need a third, independant value.

[Koval]

/shrug. You can have a perfectly functional machine that does a job, and does it really damn well, but there's a horrible design flaw in it that could potentially result in the whole thing exploding if there's so much as a gnat farting on the wrong point.

[DapperAnarchist]

It could be like the values shown on the properties of a music file - such as Length, Bit Rate, and Size. Even though any two of those will provide the third (in theory at least, assuming the bit rate is constant across the file - which I think they are), you still may want all three. So though any one of those values can be known from the other two, administratively, you still want to have all three there in front of you.

[Ynek]

Me being the contrary sort, I actually disagree with you on the correlation between safety and the other two properties.

To me, the "safety" property represents how visible the psyker is to warp entities and how difficult it is for warp-related XY and Z to interfere with their brains.

To run with a metaphor, let's say that a psyker is like an army tank. The 'power' stat represents the raw damage that its weapons can deal out. The 'control' stat represents the accuracy and reliability of the aforementioned weapons. In this case, 'safety' would represent how easy the tank is to spot, and how easy it is to attack.

For instance, a bright luminous orange rhino tank looted by orks and piloted by a grot has only a bolter as a weapon, which is very low on power. Similarly, as it is piloted by a single grot, the odds are that the control over the weapon is minimal. However, since the tank happens to be bright orange and is surely covered with ork glyph poles, it would be a very easy target, and the poorly-maintained engines and insulation would surely generate a lot of heat which would make it a very easy target for a heat seeking missile.

In contrast, a camouflage-painted predator with an insulated engine, radar jammer and sonar-absorbing armour plating, piloted by marine marksmen would have more firepower, more accuracy and reliability, and also more safety (Better armour, and also less visible).

However, similarly, we could have a bright luminous orange predator piloted by marines, which would be highly visible, but also have high firepower and control.

I hope that this barely-coherent metaphor illustrates what I mean when I say that I don't think that the three properties are at all related to one another.

However, this opens up the doors for all sorts of interesting mathematics for the administratum. Perhaps there is a series of 'psyker constants', which might be used to calculate the overall usefulness of the psyker based upon the three primary property numbers.