Void Shield Harness

The Void Shield Harness was an archeotech personal defensive device employed by certain Imperial and Traitor forces during the Great Crusade and Horus Heresy eras. Though bordering on the esoteric, Warp-based Void Shield technology was broadly understood by the ancient Mechanicum and used to protect starships, static installations and large war machines such as Titans.

Void Shield Harness technology was recovered by Mechanicum Questors serving at the leading edge of the Great Crusade and represented a miniaturisation of the technology that the Tech-priests of Mars proved unable to replicate.

The harness-mounted generator projected a nigh-impenetrable force shield that protected the bearer and those nearby, but which could be dangerous to all in its immediate vicinity if catastrophically overloaded by enemy fire.

History
The Great Crusade came in the wake of the Age of Strife, a long and terrible era during which Mankind unleashed and was laid low by weapons of star-razing destructive power and genocidal scope, many born during the preceding Age of Technology.

When the Emperor's crusading forces pushed back the darkness that had fallen upon the worlds of Mankind, evidence of the ancient and terrible artefacts were found and studied by the tech-savants of the Mechanicum, who coveted them greatly.

Occasionally, one of these examples of ancient archaeotech would be recovered and taken up by the heroes of the Great Crusade itself, becoming a potent relic, its name and legend as widespread and celebrated as the Crusaders who bore it into battle.

As the Great Crusade continued ever onwards, multiple examples of some types of relic were encountered and great effort was committed to cataloguing their class, understanding their nature and replicating their function. Often the Mechanicum could fathom the basic technology underpinning a relic, but could not create a functioning copy.

Nonetheless, the effort to decode the ancient technological foundation of such artefacts continued, with other discoveries made in the process expanding the canon of the Machine God exponentially.