Though Comstar's Comguards were long viewed as synonymous with the advanced technologies and weapons of the Star League era, the rarely mentioned truth was that, much like the SLDF before it, the Comguard originally depended primarily on the same machines as the Great Houses of their time, using the same fairly mundane technology. For every advanced Flashman there were ten Warhammers not appreciably different from the humble machines being operated by the House armies. At the time the Comguards were founded, this was simply a matter of practicality. The Comguard drew their equipment from vast stockpiles left behind by the SLDF during the Exodus, and, obviously, the SLDF took all the best equipment with them. The smaller size of the Comguards allowed them to concentrate the relatively smaller portion of advanced weapons that remained, but by necessity, the remainder would only stand out during the late succession wars by how well maintained it was.
For most of the Third Succession War, this was perfectly acceptable. In the event of actual conflict, Comstar's vast stockpiles of materials would prove far more of a decisive edge than their advanced technology. They had no real fear of being surpassed by the houses any time soon, or so they thought.
The gradual recovery of the Inner Sphere during the mid 30s and early 40s, combined with Primus Waterly's more aggressive policies relative to her predecessors, began to change these opinions, resulting in a general refit and upgrade program (tagged project CELESTIAL WARD) of Comguard units, beginning in 3045. This "bottom up" program focused on starting with the machines most immediately in need of upgrades, with the intention of gradually modernizing the entire Comguard.
Stage One refits focused on relatively minor changes to the oldest designs in the Comguards' inventory. These updates were often much more modest than those being developed by the houselords at the time, avoiding any changes that would require extensive reconstruction. However these upgrades, developed under a single unified program and aided by extensive computer modeling and simulation, often resulted in superior machines compared to many of the early results seen among the numerous house refit and upgrade programs. Stage One was expected to be fully completed by 3050, however frequent delays meant that by the time of the Battle of Tukayyid, less than 60% of those upgrades were complete. With the Comguards as a whole suffering material losses approaching 50% during the battle, with defections sapping their strength even further, the resources allocated to upgrades instead went to replace losses with new, advanced designs produced both on Terra and from sources across the Inner Sphere. By 3055, the Comguards had been rebuilt into a modernized, well equipped force, but CELESTIAL WARD was long dead.
The upgraded designs produced under the CELESTIAL WARD program were believed largely extinct by the time of the Jihad, lost to combat damage or replaced by later designs. This was proven false rather dramatically when an entire Blakist Division equipped with these machines attacked the world of Pocologan in early 3068. In addition to this force (an independent division known as the Fili Dei), the Blakists were known to issue these mechs extensively to their lesser allies, particularly the more unscrupulous mercenaries and pirates they were able to draw to their side. The source of these machines was unknown until after the war, when captured Blakists revealed that hidden factions within Comstar itself had been running their own parallel upgrade program since the beginning of CELESTIAL WARD, using equipment that had been recovered from the grave site of the 395th Battlemech Division, a Star League unit that had been stranded in the periphery and died out shortly after the exodus. This faction had managed to stockpile hundreds of upgraded machines for goals still unknown, and when the Jihad began, they pledged those resources to the Blakist cause, going so far as to equip their own Division, the same Fili Dei that attacked Pocologan at the start of the war and raised chaos across the Inner Sphere to the war's end.
This faction and its private military force were believed to be almost completely wiped out by war's end, along with the rest of the Word of Blake. However, their legacy continues to linger. Battlemechs upgraded to these specifications continue to appear among bandits, pirates, and other denizens of the Periphery. It is believed that the Fili Dei was actively equipping and training pirate forces during the war as a way of raising further chaos even as the Word of Blake came closer to defeat, and it is definite that the blakists left caches of equipment all across the Inner Sphere to support their war effort. Its impossible to know how long this legacy of the Word of Blake will continue to haunt the Inner Sphere.
