Quote Originally Posted by Ath192 View Post
So after Delubrum Reginae
It's a call back to FFII. That's when they started referencing the Super Star Destroyer with the first Imperial Dreadnaught. And in that game, it flew from its construction zone over every inhabited town in the game, except Mysidia and Palamecia, and bombed the populace such that almost all NPCs disappear from towns.

The Garleans tried this in 1.0, and as many others have pointed out, Midgardsormr brought the dreadnaught down, and we go through its wreckage in Keeper of The Lake.

Anyway, a dreadnaught like the one we see is not a tool on conquest, rather it's one of destruction. You don't really conquer a territory by blowing it all to hell. You have to do it tactically, and so, unless there's a real big problem target that they specifically need the dreadnaught's firepower for, then it's largely just a huge waste of resources. Even with Nuclear bombs, the objective isn't to just blow up your enemy's cities and land. It's to create large tactical corridors to protect wings of your invasion force, or it's running surgically precise ballistic targets to take out manufacturing/other crucial logistic facilities.

TL; DR - What they do with the dreadnaught scenes in fiction is try to show you the villain's power and awe you into thinking, "How are we going to stop that?" The answer is always a plucky underdog mission, whether it be boarding the thing when it it lands to refuel and setting a bomb in its engine room or whether it's a Death Star trench run, the dreadnaught's power is illusive for story purposes.

Also, as pointed out in the MSQ for 5.4, the Garlean defectors have shared and spread magitek around Eorzea enough that Ishgard and other city states now have Excelsior class airships, and Manacutters are common. So common, in fact, that there are Sky Pirates, and the Sky Pirates have even built their own Dreadnaught of sorts.

There's no lore discrepancy here. It's just Final Fantasy doing its thing.