/btg/ - BattleTech General

The 'Mech that aspires to being the Gunapult or the ARC-2RMG.

New to this franchise and trying to figure out what mechs to include in a YOUR DUDES mercenary company. What are people's favorite mechs and planes and why? And would there be a point to other conventional forces like tanks or would it be good to add? And does it make sense for mercs to have battle armor? Or only conventional infantry?

I'm just discovering the Shadow Hawk, Archer, and Ebon Jaguar and they're all pretty hardcore I think, but I want to see what other cool options there are. Also not sure how easy it will be to fit them in to a merc company.

For reference, I'm familiar with the concept of the Dark Ages but don't know any details, I've read the Blood of Kerensky, started reading Jade Phoenix, and have played MWO and watched Ouchies.

I like almost all the Unseens, other personal favorites are the Hunchback, King Crab, Thug and my mechfu the Catapult

>Ebon Jaguar
Definitely one of my favorites, and part of what keeps me playing Smoke Jaguar/Clan OpFor. Frankly, what more we may have gotten from them in terms of toys is what makes me miss the Jags. Luckily /btg/ has kept me well supplied with AU Jag rides over the years.

The Cauldron-Born/Ebon Jaguar would be uncommon in a mercenary unit, since it is Clan technology. At least, depending your time period. Personally I'm not a fan of it due to the thin leg armor, but that's neither here nor there.

You forgot the Mediafire link for the full zipped archives.

mediafire.com/folder/tw2m414o1j9uj/Battletech_Archives

The thunderbolt is an absolute merc classic and a solid choice for any unit, the warhammer and archer are both nice, too, the Merlin is a good utility machine, and if you're playing Dark Age, the Hound is a really excellent all-rounder mercenary mech
As for tanks, yes, absolutely bringing some makes sense. Battle armor for mercs is 100% era-dependant, and conventional infantry should really only be used for paycheck padding and DropShip/base security

Also, the Crescent Hawks and Butte Hold links are both dead.

Though it's pretty ugly, the bandersnatch is one if the best support-utility mechs ever built, especially in a mercenary context, and it is especially good at murdering vehicles.

The Shad and the Archer are perfectly good choices for mercenary 'Mechs.

In the 3025-3050ish era, you can't go wrong with having Marauders (probably as the unit CO's ride), Archers, Warhammers, the trio of 55-tonners (Griffin, Wolverine, Shadow Hawk), Phoenix Hawks and bugs (Locust, Wasp, Stinger). Awesomes are awesome for their firepower and sheer toughness, Trebuchets are solid missile boats and Stalkers are the most common assault and a solid choice if you bracket fire.

The Banderplog is much better looking, though, and I agree, it's one of the most solid types of its era. Extra points for being a machine designed for the mercenary market.

>uncommon, since it is Clan technology
What would be a few lore-friendly-ish ways for me to include a small amount of Clan pieces that doesn't come off as screamingly-obvious sue-ness? There are a couple that I rather like, but I also want the unit to feel like it fits in to the setting at large.

>Dark Age
>battle armor is 100% era-dependant
>In the 3025-3050-ish era
So what's the deal with the eras? And what eras are most commonly played? Which would be the most merc-friendly, both in terms of seeing action and pay and in terms of having the most friendly spread of mechs to choose from?

Dark age for most variety in equipment.

A lot of people like classic battletech(3025~), the era right after clan invasion, and Jihad.
Dark age is pretty well played from what I've seen but it also has a ridiculous tech spread and some weird rules as a result.

>What would be a few lore-friendly-ish ways for me to include a small amount of Clan pieces that doesn't come off as screamingly-obvious sue-ness? There are a couple that I rather like, but I also want the unit to feel like it fits in to the setting at large.
If you want a Cauldron-Born, your best bet is to fluff your unit as fighting in Operation Bulldog, the Invasion and destruction of the Smoke Jaguar holdings in the Inner Sphere. The same with other Clan gear. Most mercenaries sell their Clantech due to difficulties in keeping it supplied and in good maintenance however.

>So what's the deal with the eras?
The setting is broken up into mostly discrete eras for ease of play. If you say you want to run a Star League Era game, it has X list of mechs. A Clan Invasion era force? Here's X+Y list of mechs, due to tech advancement.

>And what eras are most commonly played?
Succession Wars, Clan Invasion, Jihad and Dark Age. Some people also play the Star League era, but those are folks willing to sit around with battalions of the same mech.

>Which would be the most merc-friendly
Clan Invasion, Civil War, and Jihad. The DA has good access to tech, but most of the hiring worlds are occupied, under attack, or irradiated hellholes.

>lore-friendly-ish ways for me to include a small amount of Clan pieces

I'd say no complete Clan 'Mechs unless there's a really really good reason (Camacho's Caballeros got their single Clan 'Mech, a Timber Wolf, as partial recompensation for getting their shit kicked in by the Smoke Jaguars and their commander's daughter getting killed during that). Even if you'd salvage Clan 'Mechs, your employers would want it for themselves and give you cold hard cash or equivalent Inner Sphere 'Mechs in return Perhaps a few Clan weapons refitted on IS chassis, like the Avanti's Angels had.

The eras are, roughly:

>3025-3050, the 4th Succession War and before the Clan invasion: old technology all round, with Star League tech making a comeback post-Helm Core and the War of 3039.
>3050-3067, the Clan Invasion/FC Civil War era. New tech ahoy, new 'Mechs coming out of assembly lines, includes the incredibly fun era of the Chaos March (a bunch of independent planets centred on Terra and just a few jumps away from Outreach, the merc planet)
>3067-3080s: Jihad: nukes, biological weapons, cats and dogs lying together, mass hysteria. Again, more new tech, Word of Blake's homemade Mechs, etc.
>Dark Age: Lumberjack mechs, Technical jeeps, tanks.
>Current Age (3140s): Yet more new tech.

My favourite periods to play are 3025-3060ish (from the 4th SW to the Chaos March getting shut down).

Continuing from this trend, what kinda Clantech might a DCMS force be packing by the latter parts of the Clan Invasion era?

...

Kinda rare. They actually have a shit ton of it from the Invasion and Bulldog, plus their pet Cats before they turn on them, but they tend to cluster it together in their top units.

So when you run into a Daishi, it will probably have a Vulture and Masakari buddies as well as a Black Hawk KU with a clantech loadoat. But actually running into that unit instead of your standard Dracbuilt Panther/Dragon company is not that common.

>get into Dark Age
>hear about the "Republic of the Sphere"
>oh cool, Terran Hegemony 2.0?
>it's a boring state with little to no flavor built on cultural genocide, people being dumb, and a cult of personality around a guy who didn't do anything

RotS players, folks who believe in Devlin Stone, what draws you to it?

Is the Republic here to stay as a faction?

Was it a BT fandom cultural phenomenon that I missed out on if I didn't read all those books in the early 2000s?

Stone was originally supposed to be Arthur Steiner-Davion but people figured it out and the idea was scrapped. Of course, this leaves the fate of Arthur forever unknown.

>RotS players, folks who believe in Devlin Stone, what draws you to it?
No idea, doesn't make sense to me either.

>Is the Republic here to stay as a faction?
No, they're collapsing as we speak (well, insofar as the timeline is advancing, anyway).

>Was it a BT fandom cultural phenomenon that I missed out on if I didn't read all those books in the early 2000s?
It seems to have been so, yes. I feel rather left out sometimes myself by virtue of not being an ex-military 35+ BT historian.

What's your favorite Word of Blake variant of a non-WoB mech?

The republic was hated by grogs from the very first day Ghost War hit the shelves.

This is literally how it went back at the turn of the century.

>Oh wow, the Fedcom Civil War is over.
>Victor quit all the game of thrones bullshit to become the new Focht
>And the Second Star League holds hope for a more peaceful future for the Sphere
>I wonder where they'll go from here

>One month later
>Ghost war on the shelves
>Eighty year time jump assholes
>By the way, five minutes after the end of the last novel everything got destroyed
>The FWL is dead
>Everybody disarmed
>There's some fucker named Stone that nobody cares about
>But he's gone
>So is every other character you've ever known except for grumpy old Bilbo Steiner-Davion
>And somehow the one last piece of the real Star League that has been kept going the last 400 years is now broken
>Enjoy

>Also FASA is dead and Battletech will now be replaced by a plastic collectable game full of dump trucks, tanks and charicatured designs

The REEEEEEEEEEE was off the charts those couple of years.

Don't forget the initial fluff for the Republic implied that the RotS was the entire Inner Sphere, and the biker gang factions were the last remnants of the Houses. That upped the REEE.

In a mercenary campaign, one of the beginners was putting in some work on a Jagermech.

We were playing Alpha Strike so yeah.

>20 tons
>12MGs
>3ERMLs

how hot does it run and how much plastic armour does it use

>The REEEEEEEEEEE was off the charts those couple of years.

And was completely justifiable, if what you're claiming happened, happened. Which I have no reason to doubt.

Also that what we knew of the Jihad was that that tiny ComStar offshoot managed to kick the shit out of Wolf's Dragoons AND all the Houses at once before this Stone guy managed to save the day, which back then, without any context, was like being told the story of how Trinidad and Tobago terrorized Earth for many years before this legendary hero came along and saved the day and oh boy wouldn't you be grateful too just like the Inner Sphere was to Stone?

Man, the work CGL put in to make the Jihad not retarded I think will always be their greatest achievement.

It runs hot only if you burst fire your MGs. And it has good armor. Clan tech is a hell of a drug.

>only burst fire
>implying I wouldn't hold trigger on the ni-..clanner

What about a mercenary lance running a Black Hawk-KU, a Rakshasa, an Avatar, and maybe a Thunderbolt, pretending to be clanners in clan space?

>pretending to be clanners
Sounds funny, make it happen.

>in clan space
Less so. There are no mercs in Clan space, only Zuul.

>There are no mercs in Clan space
Of course there's... I mean there are not any mercenaries here, we are just a passing star (our fifth guy is repairing his Hunchback, he lost one of the shoulder cannons, so he is not here). Our Clan? We're -ahem- we are from Clan...er...Steel Pineapple. What? Never heard of that? You are surely lacking in Clan History, fellow clanner!

>Clan Steel Pineapple
I'd accept their batchall, lemme tell you what.

Snark Caste scum. Abjurate them!

>the merc planet
Say more?

Outreach is THE mercenary planet in the Inner Sphere for a long time. Basically, the Federated Commonwealth gave a planet to the Wolf's Dragoons as a fiefdom, and once they parked their mech arses there, they immediately went on to make Outreach the biggest mercenary recruitment and outfitting centre in the Inner Sphere. Before Outreach was big, the place you went to hire mercs was Galatea, but Outreach eclipsed it once it got rolling.

SHD-7CS, a Project Phoenix Shadow Hawk made for ComStar in the 3060s. Word of Blake used them in the Chaos March. UAC/5, Artemis IV LRM-15, two ERM-lasers, and all of it set up on an improved C3 system. Ten and a half tons of armor, Endo Steel chassis, ultralight engine, the good shit. I also really like the -7M, which is basically the same but with CASE and a Light Gauss Rifle instead of the UAC/5.

So it's Wolf's Dragoons-owned, but they let other companies stay there on lease or something? Or does it only train future Dragoons?

If you're a mercenary unit not on the MRB/MRBC (the old and new mercenary "watchdog" groups, respectively) you can rent space on Outreach where you can stay whilst you're on R&R or wait for a new contract, plus any sane mercenary unit would have a couple of agents on Outreach permanently to meet up with employer reps, then contact your unit when they are deployed elsewhere. The Dragoons also run mercenary training courses you can enlist in, you don't have to be a Dragoon-in-training to do so.

Meant to say "not on the MRB/MRBC shit list". A merc unit can get blacklisted for war crimes, contract breaches and such, and end up on that list. If you get on it, no Outreach for you, only the more disreputable places - which is exactly what Galatea became once Outreach gained steam.

Not that guys but I have a question: why are mercenaries still accepting contracts from the Dracs?

Like most questions, this one depends on the period. Before Takashi gave the Death to Mercenaries order, the Dracs were actually fairly big employers, even if you had to be careful not to get screwed over by them. After that, everyone got out. However, after Luthien, Teddy K, who is a lot more reasonable than his father, loosened up the restrictions and the Dracs started hiring again, and whilst mercenaries aren't exactly loved in the Combine, they're not being screwed over like they were before.

Also note that even during the Death to Mercenaries order, some Dracs, such as planetary nobles and companies, continued to hire mercenaries, although they effectively concealed them as "personal guards" or "corporate security" instead. Plus, there were honest employers in the Combine even before DTM, like Isesaki Shipping.

But the bottom line? After Teddy C3 dropped the DTM, the Dracs pay well. They have places to guard on the Clan frontier, places to raid in the Clan OZs, and planets on the Federated Suns border to guard when the DCMS units are away.

Clan Steel Pineapple?
I demand to speak your current Khan

The way you paint its presentation I can see why more than just grogs would hate it. I mean wouldn't grogs be hating 3067 too?

>Don't forget the initial fluff for the Republic implied that the RotS was the entire Inner Sphere
Can you provide an example? I've never heard this.

Eh m8? The WoB stuff was being laid down for years, right down to the factories turning out massive quantities of gear and obvious hidden units being formed. The only people surprised by that were the people who'd had their heads in the dirt since Tukayyid.

>Implying people would call it Forever 67 if they didn't hate it.
Six years man, six years. It makes the IllClan delay look like a speedbump.

Sorry cannot do, he has gone crusading, from the "southern" part of the IS, good old pincer manuever

Plus a unit can get blacklisted for not breaking any rules but simply being on the Dragoons' shitlist for personal reasons.

Wannamaker's Widowmakers pls go and stay go.

They weren't blacklisted, they pulled out of the MRBC.

Being laid down, yes, but there's a big gap between a careful reading of TR 3067 and what was sprung on BT fans as an already-over-and-done with-thing. Reading "small faction X is secretly building forces" is a far cry from "and so they fought everyone for years". It took a hefty exploration of WMDs, factionalism & false flag operations, and even more detailed breakdowns of industrial potential before it appeared believable.

If you say so.

TRO 3067 postdates the Dark Age, bro. Anything published by Fanpro does, including all the stuff like Project Phoenix, Field Manual Updates and the Fedcom Civil War sourcebook.

Last real hint we had about the Blakists doing anything before Dark Age was...I wanna say Battle for Terra or TRO 3060. That's why it was such a huge leap, and why the other guy is out of his gourd if he thinks there was any indication they had scraped up fifty something regiments of battlemechs in that time. Terra had them at what, eight?

>Terra had them at what, eight?

It was in the 14-16 range, actually. But that doesn't change the larger point that most of the WOB forces got hand-waved into existence with a justification which was only a tiny bit better (Terran factories) than the FedSuns expansion (magic warehouses).

The Jihad SHOULD have kicked off in the very late 3070s; which with Terra in their possession, would have been much more reasonable a time to build up their forces to the level we saw. Unfortunately, the 3067 Jihad date was prescribed by Wizkids. There was literally nothing CGL could have done about it except just "not publish Battletech at all."

That's right, I'd forgotten 3067 was one of the first FanPro products. Thanks.

Uh, no. Fluff right up to 3067 alluded to it and the novels outright told you they had been cheating the FWL for a decade.

>handwaved
You can say that about any faction's units, it's not an argument.

>You can say that about any faction's units, it's not an argument.

It's always important. If you can just make stuff up, then there's no reason for us to bother tracking any of the unit or production information in the first place. Ignoring the existing fluff and just making shit up is a deliberate slap in the face to every fan who actually cares about the internal consistency of the setting.

> they had been cheating the FWL for a decade.

If they'd come out with 20 or so regiments instead of the 14-16 they had accounted for, and blamed that on cheating the FWL, it would have been fine. Going from 14 regiments to 20 is entirely different (and more bullshit) than going from 14 to 50+.

>the novels outright told you they had been cheating the FWL for a decade

That said they were stealing money, not machines. Even that exact same novel didn't allude to their refit of Gibson Federated as anything special, still cranking out just a couple companies a year.

>It's always important. If you can just make stuff up, then there's no reason for us to bother tracking any of the unit or production information in the first place.
Since they don't give hard numbers, there really isn't. A good example often cited here is how the Magistracy of Canopus added like a half dozen regiments in the late 3050s out of thin air.

>than going from 14 to 50+
m8 you realize the Blakists never had 50 mech regiments at once, right? All their divisions were combined arms units, most of the ones we were given identifying Greek letters for didn't correspond to having a regiment's worth of mechs in them either. And most of the "hidden" units never appeared at full strength.

Money that could be used to expand factories and *buy* machines, one might presume.

>Even that exact same novel didn't allude to their refit of Gibson Federated as anything special
I was talking Storms of Fate. Which are you meaning?

>Money that could be used to expand factories and *buy* machines, one might presume.

The Blakists pretty much funded all of Project Phoenix through Vicore and got 2/3 of every Phoenix machine ever built. None of this said until of course, years after Dark Age happened in real time.

I was talking about Ideal War, which was one of the only real Blakist novels and the one where fake Thomas tells Paul about the fund siphoning.

Now that I think about it, Double Blind also showed the Blakists as little more than a ramshackle collection of ex Comstar malcontents.

You don't get this unified thing going until 3067. Even then the last guy from the old days, Cameron St. Jamais gets hung out to dry during SCOUR.

That was really one thing that still bugs me. We never see much of the Blakist internal politics in all the Jihad books.

>That was really one thing that still bugs me. We never see much of the Blakist internal politics in all the Jihad books.
I agree, it was an important element that was missed. Stuff like the spacing of Blane being written years after the start was dumb and annoying. Seeing their Conclave and high command trying to execute the war would have been cool.

I wonder if the theory that until the near-end most Blakist divisions were operating in an intelligence vacuum unaware that they were at war with everyone is true.

>That was really one thing that still bugs me. We never see much of the Blakist internal politics in all the Jihad books.
Being written from an in-universe perspective, with no OOC wrap up, is the worst part of the Jihad. We never get definitive answers for enough of the questions.

You're in the Valhalla club on Solaris and this guy slaps your qt3.14 tech's ass and mumbles:
>Resistance is futile, heretic.

What do you do?

Slam his head into the table and tell him to 1v1 me in Ishiyama, or prove he's a little bitch.

Not him but this was the impression I got too. The first wave of DA fluff only had the Republic on its maps and the level of destruction from the Jihad was stated to be off the charts. Everything seemed to indicate that anything outside the Republic's borders was an irradiated shithole where nobody could live.

Name one. Seriously. Even the Widowmakers don't count, they tried to enter controlled airspace and make landfall on a continent that literally everyone IC knows the Dragoons do not allow outsiders onto. Bitching about that is like bitching about someone who tries to break into a head of state's personal residence being added to a no-fly list.

The original plan was for the Jihad to be shorter, with a much smaller WoB military (and also the Bears playing an even larger part, basically winning it on their own rather than being the tipping point they wound up being).

So the old FASA stuff does imply the WoB are building up, but nowehere near the extent the Jihad wound up revealing, because WK tossed to original plan for a smaller, shorter Jihad in favour of a massive, lengthy, and destructive one that required the WoB to have a much larger military to make plausible.

CGL did their best but there are good reasons for people going WTF at the size and power of WoB.

>CGL did their best

No they didn't. If they did their best they would have fixed the contradiction between the production numbers and what we actually saw. As usual, CGL dropped the ball.

>The original plan was for the Jihad to be shorter, with a much smaller WoB military

This is one half of what pisses me off with the Jihad/Dark Age storyline. A lot of the WoB people came from ROM, and they were perfectly capable of organising a campaign of covert actions. Something like Op SHROUD writ large to screw up the Successor States would have been much better - covert actions to stir up so much shit that the people would be begging for Star League peacekeepers. The FS had the Capellan and Draconis Marches with leaders just waiting for the off to attack their old enemies, just for one.

Have any of you played Battletech on tabletop simulator?

What were the production numbers exactly?

That's pretty much what we got. The WoBM was pretty small, comparatively. Their victories were due to ROM stirring shit up and a hefty dose of force multipliers. Once those two were minimized or overcome the Militia got its shit pushed in the whole way back to Terra.

New to the game and from what I can tell each mech model has a letter code signifying who the manufacturing House is. What all are the letter codes, and are they consistent?

"Op Holy Shroud writ large to sucker the Houses into attacking each other" already was the opening stage of the Jihad. It takes until like 3072 for everyone to finally settle down.

Not him, but none were ever given in terms of hard numbers. Just an implication that the WoB might have formed another 1 or 2 Divisions.

Rather than the 40 or so they did in canon. Yeah, not all of those were active or fully fleshed out at any one time but you're probably looking at them packing anywhere between 25 and 30 Divisions when the Jihad kicks off, which is a *bit* of a disparity.

A good rule of thumb is, M for Marik/Free Worlds League, S for Steiner/Lyran Commonwealth, K for Kurita/Draconis Combine, D for Davion/Federated Suns, L for Liao/Capellan Confederation. There are others, but a lot of them are simply for puns (GRF-1N Griffin, anyone?) or just for cool (AWS-8Q). X tends to be an experimental model.

The letter codes aren't always consistent, but a good rule of thumb is:
-L: Capellan Confederation
-S: Lyran Commonwealth
-D: Federated Suns
-M: Free Worlds League
-K: Draconis Combine
-R: SLDF/Terran Hegemony
-WB: Word of Blake
-CS: ComStar
-O: Inner Sphere Omnimech

These do rise and fall out of favor, so you'll have to look up who owns what design to be sure. The Enforcer III having ENF-6M as a Davion design is a good one for inconsistency.

I've never seen anything to suggest only one or two. Even if they kicked off the Jihad with 25-30 divisions total, 10 of those already existed officially and given how conventional heavy their forces were 15-20 isn't unreasonable given they controlled a solid industrial base. Compare it to the Magistracy of Canopus acquiring around 5 regiments of mechs within a lesser amount of time and possessing an industrial base virtually nonexistent in comparison.

Not totally consistent because there are examples of M being for Missile variant and the like, but generally:

#R: Star League, but after its fall something everyone has.
#D: Federated Suns.
#K: Draconis Combine.
#L: Capellan Confederation.
#S: Lyran Commonwealth/Lyran Alliance.

Periphery uses #T for the Taurians and, IIRC #H for the Marians.

Not consistent at all but generally

D-Davion
L-Liao
S-Steiner
K-Kurita
M-Marik
R-Regular
G-General
N-Normal
X-Experimantal
W-Word of Blake
C-Clantech refit of IS chassis or Drac C3 refit

T/P/Q don't seem to line up with anything.

Almost forgot Rb - SL Royal

The solid industrial base is a CGL retcon.

Anastasius Focht lets them keep Terra because as far as he and everyone else knew the only thing there worth having was the Titan shipyards which remained under ComStar control for some time.

It was then discovered to be riddled with high-output factories because that's the only way to explain WoB's growth, but requires proto-WoB to have maintained its conspiracy from the very earliest days of ComStar with absolute secrecy. Which... ehh. Might not be so bad on its own, but then you start looking at all the other shit that has to go their way.

As far as it being only a few Divisions, IIRC it's in the White Flame/Blue Flame text. And since the stuff in TR 3067 has WoB re-opening a few old lines very recently, that would jive with there only being a few extra Divisions tops, rather than them actually having triple or more the forces they are credited with in the FMs.

I'll go back and reread some of that fluff then.

That's more -[any letter]b

I mean, the believability is arguable either way.

From the pro perspective, the books do say that's how it happened... but those books post-date WizKids and their version of the Jihad.

From the anti perspective, the stuff before WizKids was leading to a very different Jihad so they suggest a much smaller and less capable WoB... which gets explained away as good WoB OpSec.

It's clumsily handled, for reasons outside anyone but Weisman's control.

>all these Blake-lovers
>forgetting the original faction of grand plots and losing wars

Don't forget that the reason everyone calls Focht retarded is that Comstar spent a whole boatload of cash and time bringing big boys like Skobel back online to replace their Tukayyid losses, then lost it to the Blakists exactly as they were finally cranking out material.

So Focht brushing that off as well as the Titan Yards and Liberty Station was absolutely egregious negligence. I guess from his view, they're basically old Comstar so who cares, the clans are a much bigger deal.

The worst part was that situation happened a second time after they upgraded all the remaining Rasalhague factories and built some new ones. The hogs kicked them out right as everything was coming online in decent quantity.

Comstar just could not catch a break between 3053 and 3082. 3130-3150 has been much tougher on them though, because they don't have those old 2750 reserves to draw on like they did the last century.

Well Word of Focht was run by morons. What was its draw anyway? Successor States had patriotism/honor/nobility, old ComStar/WoB had religion, what was FochtStar's draw to get people to join?
>"Hey, it's a job."
No wonder it fell the fuck apart.

Dark Age Comstar has reverted to old Comstar. The dudes were even wearing the robes and stuff again. Mostly I think because all surviving administration personnel from the WoB were folded back into C* at the end of the war.

Unfortunately, that fun development got kicked in the balls.

Same thing happens to the Wolves.

Wolves: "Let's upgrade the Rasalhague factories we captured."
Ghost Bears: "YOINK!"
Wolves: "Well, shit. Let's build some new ones."
Hell's Horses: "Ours now, suckers! Also we're blocking your access to the Homewolds, lolol."
Wolves: "God fucking dammit. Expand the lines on Tamar, at least we can defend those."
Word of Blake: "HA HA TIME FOR NUKES!"

Or the Dracs, who gave away the only two major production sites that survived the Jihad to the Republic of the Sphere, because reasons.

The writers just don't think things through, either in terms of what factions would be making a serious effort to hold or what the logical consequences of losing them would be.

Pre-Jihad what are some books that have ComGuard and WoBM RATs?

FM: ComStar and FM: U definitely.

Maybe EraReport 3052/3060 but I haven't really read those.

The Tukayyid scenario pack has ways to randomly generate a ComStar force too.