Baar Dau

Mavloc

Why didn't the dunmer just build some ladders, scale the meteor, and mine it down to nothing?

VaranisArano

They tried something else. It didn't work out.

The Elder Scrolls novel "The Infernal City" deals in part with the Dunmer attempts to deal with Baar Dau.

http://en.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:Baar_Dau
http://en.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:Ingenium


Also, in Morrowind, its a pretty substantial hunk of rock even with the Ministry of Truth carved out of it.

WhiteCoatSyndrome

Mavloc wrote: »

Why didn't the dunmer just build some ladders, scale the meteor, and mine it down to nothing?

They really should have. And the fact that they DO eventually hollow it out means it can be mined away, so it isn't like it's made out of something indestructible.

During the Tribunal Temple days I can see why not, because of how touchy they get about anything dealing with their false gods. But once Vivec vanished during the Oblivion Crisis all bets should have been off, because they KNEW it was coming down. The ingenium should have been, at most, a stopgap measure until they could reduce the thing to rubble or open a gate under it to send it back to Oblivion.

MythicEmperor

Before VEHK vanished, doing such a thing would be heresy. It was a sign of love for his people. As @VaranisArano pointed out, they tried something different. Sure, it failed, but who’s to say that mining it away wouldn’t have caused some other unforeseen consequence? When the Ministry of Truth was carved out, it was upheld by the will of Vivec. How did they know that tampering with it wouldn’t trigger its fall without the powers of a god to stop it? Is that a bet you’d be willing to take when a system was currently working?

LadyNerevar

While it's not confirmed anywhere, a popular theory is that each bit of the mined-out rock retained its velocity just like the main meteor. When the main portion plummeted with its original force, so did every little bit that had become a brick/relic/paving stone/decorative marker/random pile of rocks, causing destruction throughout the province.

VaranisArano

LadyNerevar wrote: »

While it's not confirmed anywhere, a popular theory is that each bit of the mined-out rock retained its velocity just like the main meteor. When the main portion plummeted with its original force, so did every little bit that had become a brick/relic/paving stone/decorative marker/random pile of rocks, causing destruction throughout the province.

But even then, greatly reducing the mass of each individual object and spreading out the pieces would have worked to reduce the overall destruction to spread out the impact(s) across a larger area. So if the Dunmer had deliberately broken up Baar Dau as much as they could and spread the debris around, the devastation could possibly have been lessened. But there's not a lot of evidence that they could do that, at least in the time given to them.

Summoning a gate to send it back to Oblivion is an interesting idea except that it'd be hard to tell when the stone was going to fall (and probably too late to set one up once it did) so that gate would have to be a standing, constant thing. Problem is, the Oblivion Crisis was able to maintain sustained gates to Oblivion because the Dragonfires were unlit. Martin Septim relit the Dragonfires and permanently reestablished the barriers between Oblivion and Nirn, so...nice job breaking it, hero? At least, that's my theory on why that wouldn't work.