Covenant technology

The Covenant collective's relationship with technology is complex and in many ways more nuanced than readily apparent.

Overview
A common question posed by human xenoanalysts and military brass alike is to what extent the Covenant understand their own technology. The Office of Naval Intelligence struggled to answer this question for decades, with new examples and discoveries often contradicting prior theories. A rather reductive but popular view that perpetuated especially among the human civilian population and even the UNSC military and intelligence community since the onset of the Human-Covenant War was that the Covenant do not understand their technology at all, or simply plastered their inferior technology atop advanced technology of Forerunner origin. While there is a kernel of truth to this, the reality is more complex, and has to do with how the Covenant classify their technology.

Covenant technological progress was sporadic, with long periods of relative stagnation punctuated by paradigm shifts ushered in by the reverse-engineering of new Forerunner discoveries, whose implementation en masse was dictated chiefly by necessity. There were times the Covenant would discover a valuable technology, but keep its widespread application limited for Ages both due to the lack of external pressure to implement it, as well as the benefits of keeping strategic technologies exclusive. Pressure, in turn, was often created by the competitive dynamics between the various splinter factions of the Covenant — between High Charity and the domains, between various fabricant-guilds and clans, or between the various feuding ministries. External pressures also occurred, though they were more rare due to the Covenant's scarcity of peer opponents.

Classification
Officially, the Covenant divided various technologies they used into several broad classes:

Entrusted technology
Entrusted technology is understood and produced only by High Charity and its ecclesiastic institutions. There is a simple and ironclad line of dogma to justify this: Since the Prophets are entrusted with the search for the Great Journey, they are also entrusted with the disposal of the technology discovered in that search. The Prophets have the final say one what technology the Holy Ecumene is properly prepared to receive, and what technology must remain restricted to the higher castes, though it must be noted that their say has sometimes been swayed by very persuasive civil wars. Examples of entrusted technology include plasma lances, Borer slipspace drives, most classes of repulsor engines, high-end slipspace navigation systems, and long-range wavespace communicators.

Most pieces of entrusted technology are highly complex, strategically significant, and only possible to manufacture through highly specialized raw materials, machinery and expertise. It is not uncommon for elements of entrusted technology to require extensive manufacturing facilities dedicated only to the production of that technology, with most such manufactories existing in High Charity. Anointed Fabricaries are diocesan manufactories blessed with holy mandates from High Charity to produce and maintain entrusted technology outside the holy city. Usually these are strictly focused on one technology or a narrow line thereof, and under strict Ministerial oversight. These include regional shipyard-complexes such as that around Zhoist, as well as the Holy Ecumene's relative handful of transmutators used to create various forms of newmatter. Rather than fixed locations, many of these fabricaries were located on various forgeships, enormous materials-extraction and factory vessels that sailed under High Charity's blessing. Though distributed to the domains, entrusted-grade assembly forges were mostly black boxes, and required highly specific incantations and rites to operate. Most pointedly, they could only be maintained or replaced with personnel and tools from the Ministries, ensuring High Charity's hegemony. It was the slippage of this hegemony in the Covenant's Late Antiquity that led to the centuries-long splintering that characterized the empire's Feudal Period, and it took many ages of concerted research and military buildup for High Charity to finally reassert its hegemony over the provinces in the Second Illumination.

Sanctioned technology
Some entrusted technologies are passed out to clans and secular governments outside of the Ministries, although manufacturing and maintenance has remained under the control of the Prophets since the Covenant's High Antiquity. But when the Prophets deem that the time has come, the trust is expanded to the entire Holy Ecumene, or at least the parts in good standing. This is sanctioned technology, which may be manufactured or repaired with the blessing of High Charity. This is largely for pragmatic reasons: High Charity and the Prophets have no interest nor ability to police all technology used across the vast breadth of the Holy Ecumene, only those technologies that give High Charity's institutions the edge they require to dominate the Covenant cultural sphere.

Some entrusted technology become sanctioned within a generation of its discovery, while other forms of technology will only be sanctioned long after it is obsolete. Slipspace drives are one such example. The slipspace drives available on the open market, known as Blinkers, are only a few generations more advanced than the ones that the Sangheili developed natively, whereas only High Charity's ecclesiastic authorities have access to the mass manufacture of Forerunner-derived Borer drive technology. Meanwhile, most ground weapons, vehicles, and equipment are sanctioned technology, able to be produced even by decently well-equipped clan armories. Most everyday technologies used by the Covenant's member species are also sanctioned technology. There is often little distinction in such technologies between a species' native technology and that based on the Covenant technological base, and in many cases the two exist side by side. This is particularly true with the Sangheili, whose native technology base served as the basis for much of the Covenant's technology in the early days.

Native technology
Native technology is the technological and industrial base that each client race brings to the Covenant. Whether medicine or rocket technology or computer science, this technology remains in use for a long time after the species’ incorporation into the Covenant. Officially, there is nothing wrong with using the tools that you have developed before the light of High Charity graced your doorstep, as long as those tools did not violate Covenant dogma (e.g. Associated Intelligences). Unofficially, the Ministries drown each new client species in a metaphorical deluge of technological gifts until the metaphorical bubbles from native industry stop. Most pieces of native technology that remain in use are everyday conveniences that have little to no military value, such as civilian vehicles and spacecraft or household appliances.

Ulterior technology
Ulterior technology (sometimes called Umbral technology) is a generalized category for lines of technology and science developed during the Covenant outside High Charity's influence and guidance, and/or acquired in trade from the Ulteria, i.e. external, non-Covenant civilizations. This was exceedingly rare, and only significant in specific cases; most Ulterior technologies were minor curiosities and novelty items. In rare cases, Ulterior technologies have been adopted by the mainstream Covenant, an example of this superluminal communications technology acquired from the Rhiln during the Covenant's ancient crusade against that machine civilization.

Knowledge and expertise
Within the Covenant, there exist many guilds whose members have a functional understanding of sanctioned technology and its manufacture. Entrusted technology is considerably rarer, and wasn't fully understood even by the Prophets. Outside the lost Ministries, its study and maintenance was carried out in secret by wealthy clans and underworld organizations. Entrusted technology can be had in the post-war world, for the right price, from the right friends.

With the Covenant, it is also important to be mindful of the distinction between them understanding their technology and being able to operate, or even repair, it. Many non-Entrusted or even non-Sanctioned organizations and individuals had a basic ability to repair select Entrusted or Sanctioned technologies, but their understanding of the technology was ritualistic and surface-level: low-level machinists did have a decent understanding of the specific procedures required to operate or even repair the technologies entrusted to them (such as weapons, vehicles and the subsystems of a starship), but this did not mean they understood the principles governing their inner workings. Such knowledge was limited to the ministries and special holy orders that created those technologies. If pieces of technology such as a starship had problems mundane machinists could not fix, the only option was to contact the organizations entrusted with safeguarding that technology, a process that was often long and arduous. At the same time, Covenant mechanics tend to be more clever and flexible than their ritualistic training might suggest, and often devise lateral solutions to technical problems. Such fixes are formally unsanctioned by the clergy, but at the same time, the clergy often turns a blind eye to them as their own numbers and resources are limited.

As such, even without High Charity's vast multitudes of discovery-priests, the ex-Covenant at large still retain a fair bit of know-how on how to repair, even manufacture their existing technology; however, the ability to innovate and create new technologies (with or without Forerunner reverse-engineering), or apply existing technologies in novel ways, are rare and treasured talents.