Dual‐Plane Summons?

[ShurikVch]

It's a feat from the Dragon #313:
Benefit: Whenever you cast any summon monster spell, you can simultaneously manifest an astral construct power and apply its benefits to the summoned creature. You pay one-half the normal cost in power points for the astral construct power (minimum 1 point). You can then apply any of the menu abilities that you could normally give the resulting astral construct to your summoned creature instead.1) What's it mean - "apply its benefits to the summoned creature"?
2) Is it worth it?
3) If you have Ectopic Form (Emerald Gyre), will your monster get an extra limb?

[Doc_Maynot]

Seems to me that it's meant to do the following: When you summon a creature or creatures with Summon Monster you may also spend half the cost of Astral Construct to give you summoned creature(s) menu abilities as an Astral Construct based on how many points you paid.
No feats or abilities that modify Astral Constructs would work unless it augments the menu options, as that's all that is applied.

Honestly, for a shaper psion/conjuration wizard theurge? It's pretty nice.

[Pluto!]

Note that the article is from 3.0, which makes the psionics stuff all a rough translation to the actually-usable 3.5 psionics system. In this case, it gets kind of wonky if directly translated because it allows access to high-level Menu items early, which wasn't an issue with the original 3.0 psionics.

I always read that as only affecting Menu items, not inherent qualities of the Astral Construct (like the Emerald Gyre's extra limb).

So if a Wizard 1/Psion 3/Cerebremancer 4 summons a Celestial Bison, he can burn 4 pp to give it Muscle for +4 Strength.

I remember trying to find something cool to do with the feat for a while, but getting frustrated because it both has messy interpretation issues (it takes some houseruling to work the way I think it was supposed to), and where it takes some obvious Shenanigans to do anything stronger than just summoning with a straightclassed Wizard would.

[redking]

Justfied thread necromancy. Would the astral construct menu from dual planes summons apply to ALL the creatures summoned? For example, Summon Monster IX can allow you to summon a single monster, or multiple monsters from a lower level list. If you summoned multiple creatures would they all get the advantage of the menu abilities selected?

[LibraryOgre]

The Mod Wonder: Empowered Maximized Quickened Banishment.