I am distinctly not buying the virtue of security by obscurity.
Our shields are unsubtle. That doesn't mean that daemons get no advantage from knowing about them - subtle temptations are a waste of effort on a literally mindless denier - but it does mean they don't have a trick that makes it easy to defeat them.
That phrase doesn't mean what you think it means.
"Security through obscurity" is not an indictment of making it harder for attackers to case you, but instead of using secrecy as a
substitute for making your security more robust against even an informed attacker. And obviously I'm not arguing for us to slack off on shield development. I'm pretty sure I'm on the far end of people advocating for high investment, actually.
The reality is, attacks in
every medium are prefaced by learning about the target if they can manage it be they hacking or burgalery or armed robbery or military invasion or good 'ol fashioned scams, and you can significantly improve your likelihood of detecting and defending against all of them by making what they want to know about you harder to get.
For context, while I am not specialized as a security professional, I've been a compTIA certified computer technician for over a decade, and I am currently a computer programmer by trade who spends a fair amount my time identifying and fixing security issues. This is more than theory for me - it's something I have long had to get right in my day job to keep it.
You might be more familiar with the term in the context of debates about the security of open source software - and it's not that some benefits of secrecy aren't being given up, it's that they're being traded in exchange for having dramatically more man-hours dedicated to auditing for vulnerabilities and improving its resilience against informed attackers, improvements that can be implemented almost instantly and effortlessly because it's just software.
And even then, actually discovered vulnerabilities are kept private for months while software vendors implement fixes before any public disclosure is made.
It goes without saying that this is not a benefit we will ever get from the orthodox adeptus mechanicus. And while some of our improvements can be pushed out effortlessly, some require significant time and industrial power to do - see our main hull's shielding which is still stuck with low density.
Contrast with Denva who
can do their own research and is strongly vetted by us and chaos-free besides. There's a reason I not only didn't argue for withholding it from them, but argued in favor of developing stuff specifically for their benefit: With them, the tradeoff is actually worth it.
Creating the conditions where it's worth it are what export restrictions and export models are all about.
Anyways, so long as we avoid our shielding systems falling into the wrong hands, the only experience chaos get trying to defeat it is when they're fighting against it in live combat, a situation where
we learn from their fumbling attempts to respond to us.
Compare that to if they even so much as have an intact sample, in that case they can experiment and learn from it at their leisure without us knowing about what they learn at all until they're using their findings against us. Export restrictions and military secrecy exist for
damn good reason.
But honestly, the broader real-world logic of why and how secrecy fits in to security postures of all kinds isn't necessary to see why here, in this quest, we really do not want to be loose with this tech.
Because we've already seen first hand what an uninformed attack looks like:
nfortunately for your chaotic assailant it's misjudged three things. First, it mistuned the attack. Instead of brute power it tried a subtler approach, whispers of maybe and what if that was designed to corrupt your machinery. But that's very much the wrong approach to use against your shielding, which just answered no. Second, it waited until after you'd upgraded its shielding to launch the attack. And third, even if it had succeeded its attack wasn't strong enough to get through the psychic shielding around your base. Even if it had gotten the first two right it would have probably managed to corrupt portions of your network, but it would have been an annoyance rather an an existential threat.
Scrapcode Generator rolls revealed:
Last turn - rolled a 21. Poor success.
This turn - rolled a 5. Failure.
-10 HP to the Scrapcode Vault.
In fact, all it's succeeded in doing is providing you more valuable data on psychic attacks and defense, as well as more data on what psychic technology looks like. These are firsthand measurements of challenging phenomena, and you almost want to thank the scrapcode generator for giving you such valuable data.
And what that same attacker can do when he's had the opportunity to learn:
-80 psychic shielding on The Spark of the Ancients
What follows is a torrent of scrapcode, perfectly tuned to destroy the scrapcode vault. Well, almost perfectly tuned. The machine spirits integrated into the station do their best to deflect and deal with the code, but they too are overwhelmed within moments. You lose all connection with the scrapcode vault in moments, and all you can do is hope that the effort exhausted the scrapcode generator.
-50 Psychic shielding on the Scrapcode Vault. Scrapcode Vault lost.
He rolled a 98 to do the latter; but so what? He needed to use that luck on having power to attempt an attack
at all, and to learn how best to apply it. An actual adversary on the field will have power to spare, and will have gotten to do all their rolling to learn and adapt off-screen before we ever meet them if we let this stuff leak.
And I'd far, far rather face the former kind of attack than the latter.
Tl;dr?
They might possess greater insights overall, but that doesn't mean that mortals don't have anything to contribute - and presumably it's different demons banging on our shields when we warp jump, whereas having captive psy shields to mess with would allow specific demons to get lots of practice. Like, Chaos isn;t stupid, if they get their hands on our psy shields they will start developing countermeasures.
This.
But if that's not convincing enough, then I implore you to consider the much worse, much bigger elephant in the room. Something that applies chiefly to the discussion about teaching the imperium how to make it.
Because as you say, by and large it seems to be the case that while warp
sight can make it through our shields somewhat, warp
effects cannot, even with significant preparation. To get a warp effect through, the shield cannot be bypassed, the shield
must be overpowered. So far, weaknesses come in the form of ways to overpower the shield more efficiently - not ways to attack through it while it's still up.
This has applied to everything save scrying, as said. HP is HP - we generally expect it to continue to apply to everything. And if it continues to do so, do you know what that would include?
Psychic attacks and demon banishing.
Let that sink in for a moment. Then, in light of that, consider this:
Also, history note, Vita's shields according to quest lore were not at all unique - what they were is outmoded. Newer hulls didn't include them because they hadn't seemed to be necessary during the Golden Age, but Vita hadn't gotten updated before she was lost. Which is probably a key to the fall, though obviously direct information is lacking.
Had they the ability to make these shields, would they not use it to deploy daemons, combatants who range from resistant to flat immune to conventional weapons, with shielding that protects them from everything they
are weak to?
Had they even
a few examples of the technology intact, the big names, daemon princes, daemon primarchs would be equipped as such at minimum. Had they even
one example,
Horus would have been equipped with it. Yet, none are or ever were.
Probably the only reason they didn't do it with stuff from the DAoT is because it doesn't self-heal, which to paraphrase Neablis - "archaeotech that is damaged when used and does not heal itself quickly becomes
broken archaeotech".
To the ruinous powers that be, those who remember that this technology once existed, the incentive would then be to suppress knowledge of it to minimize the risk that others go searching for it - or that those more competent like the Votann or Tau go trying to recreate it.
Even if we play our hand perfectly the re-emergence of the technology and its design won't stay secret forever - no point if we don't
use it at some point. But as long as keep this under wraps, that willful ignorance continues, and we get the mother of all opportunities to punch up.
And thereafter, I will continue to argue in favor of making sure Chaos has to fight tooth and claw for every scrap they can learn about our version of it without us learning right back, so we can continue to face attacks more like bongo's shitty turn 16 attempt than his terrifying, able-annhialate-denva's-biosphere turn 18 breakout.
