The Burn

[ObsidianFire]

It's kinda hard to tell, but all three members of the Warring Triad are in smaller versions of Dalamud in the Aetherchemical Research Facility. They just havn't been launched into orbit yet...

Dalamud itself is humongous. You can best see how large it is in the North Shroud. There's a huge curved piece of it lodged in the earth. Anther good places to see how big it is/was is in Eastern Thanalan at the Burning Wall. The pieces of it seem to indicate Dalamud was far wider then the bowl of the Dawn Throne. Dalamud was so big, people thought it was a small moon after all.

Tiamt would never have been contained in something like Dalamud. She is not a primal, which was what Dalamud was designed to contain. She could have been one of the beasts guarding it like Twintania was.

[LineageRazor]

Dalamud itself is humongous.

Thanks to Coil Turn 5, it's possible to get a ballpark estimate of just how big Dalamud really was. Turn 5 takes place literally on Bahamut's reconstructed hand, so we get a clear indication of how big his hand is in comparison to a human. There was a thread a few years ago that spent some time trying to figure out just how big Bahamut really was. Because Bahamut fit pretty snugly into Dalamud, the answer to that provides a pretty good hint as to how big Dalamud was. The original poster, in trying to figure out Bahamut's size, started with the assumption that Dalamud was similar in size to Menphina, and also made the assumption that Menphina is as large as Earth's moon - neither of which can be assumed, really, and resulted in a Bahamut that was ridiculously large.

Later in the thread, though, Anonymoose made an estimate based on the size of the arena for Turn 5. He put Bahamut's height at roughly 1.7 miles, which seems reasonable, if we accept that Limsa Lominsa (which Bahamut flew over in cutscene) is fairly small compared to many real-life cities. I'm going to guess that Bahamut was balled up pretty tight in Dalamud as the Allagans likely didn't feel the need to take his comfort into consideration, and the smaller an object is, the easier it is to put it into space. So 1.7 miles is also a decent estimate for the diameter of Dalamud, including both Bahamut and the shell around him.

That sounds pretty big - but it's worth noting that it's FAR smaller than even the smallest moon in our solar system (Deimos, at 7 miles), and laughably small compared to our moon (2159 miles) which, presumably, Menphina is based upon. Dalamud likely had a very low orbit in order to be mistaken as a moon. Don't get me wrong, though - any man-made machine that can be measured in miles is a pretty serious hunk of hardware.