Sometimes it do backfire though, for example imperial comissar Yarrick fought successfully against some of the biggest orkish invasions and improved this by conscious propaganda effort aimed at both his soldiers and orks, and orks did believed in him as the main boss of humans and thus their own belief empowered him. Not that they seen it as backfiring, in the contrary the bigger and harder the fight the better, in fact orks are routinely disappointed when the fight is too easy, they prefer hard massacres with huge losses on both sides (which might partially explain why 40k setting is so full of pyrrhic victories in general).
No. The only entity that seriously researched the orks themselves is the Ordo Xenos of the Inquisition, but they only went so far as to assume orks are partially gestalt psionic entities (which they are) but the exact workings of this is unknown to them, they only reliably observed that isolated ork become increasingly passive up to the point of going into coma and dying. Other characteristical example is Adeptus Mechanicus studying huge amounts of ork weaponry and other technic and constantly stumbling on the fact that it is a pile of junk and it shouldn’t work and assuming it never worked or that it was somehow damaged before aquisition. Furthermore it gets complicated by the fact some of ork equipment do work more or less normally, though usually very unreliably for someone who is not an ork (and often for orks too, they do believe technic should malfunction from time to time, usually in explosive or other funny and violent manner). Also their research (just as the one of inquisition) is constantly being hampered by the internal conflicts and secrecy inside all factions of imperium.
Sometimes it do backfire though, for example imperial comissar Yarrick fought successfully against some of the biggest orkish invasions and improved this by conscious propaganda effort aimed at both his soldiers and orks, and orks did believed in him as the main boss of humans and thus their own belief empowered him. Not that they seen it as backfiring, in the contrary the bigger and harder the fight the better, in fact orks are routinely disappointed when the fight is too easy, they prefer hard massacres with huge losses on both sides (which might partially explain why 40k setting is so full of pyrrhic victories in general).
Do the humans know of this ork power?
No. The only entity that seriously researched the orks themselves is the Ordo Xenos of the Inquisition, but they only went so far as to assume orks are partially gestalt psionic entities (which they are) but the exact workings of this is unknown to them, they only reliably observed that isolated ork become increasingly passive up to the point of going into coma and dying. Other characteristical example is Adeptus Mechanicus studying huge amounts of ork weaponry and other technic and constantly stumbling on the fact that it is a pile of junk and it shouldn’t work and assuming it never worked or that it was somehow damaged before aquisition. Furthermore it gets complicated by the fact some of ork equipment do work more or less normally, though usually very unreliably for someone who is not an ork (and often for orks too, they do believe technic should malfunction from time to time, usually in explosive or other funny and violent manner). Also their research (just as the one of inquisition) is constantly being hampered by the internal conflicts and secrecy inside all factions of imperium.
Very cool