CG Midlander

[Catapult]

Woot! Ferne did me a favour!

E-herm...
/regains composure

Ok, two points on Dalamud Prime.

- Dalamud Prime definitely has more spikes. It may be safe to assume that if Second Dalamud was created in the same way, it didn't have as much oomph in it. I mean, for starters, it failed. But more importantly, Louisoix had to scramble to pull it togther. Ancient Allag would have had a gang of arcanists and/or summoners working on it.

- Erosion. Anything that has been up in the sky for over a millenia is gonna take some damage in the form of weathering on the way up and down and space debris that hasn't had a chance to burn up in the atmosphere. This is in addition to the thing getting bloddy hot and spitting off fragments as meteorites. That thing was bound to be a wreck of its original form by the time it was ready to shatter.

And on the banner, I'm simply inclined to think the thing is old and re-purposed by the Path, rather than being something they made themselves. If one of the Twelve's most significant moments in history was the sealing of Bahamut, it's going to leave behind some consequental cultural relics, even if their meaning has since been forgotten. And textiles can survive a millenia or two if properly taken care of.

I'm also inclined to the think that the whole "Dalamud is a prison for a bad guy" concept was at least on the cards for lore people to take advantage of at some point for an expansion. SE lore masters are known for having way more ideas brainstormed than they can fit into a plotline (particulalry the case for Pulse and Ivalice), although you'll still see that background lore working it's way into the game's environment to create a better working picture, Tolkien-style. Trying to retcon stuff in an FF world would be really complicated.
Chances are Yoshi-P met with the lore guys in Jan 2011 and asked "what are our plot options and can you do armageddon without rewriting your Eorzean history books?" Casting meteor on the lesser "moon" would have then emerged as such an option to consider.