Unless there's a book or in-game explanation that says that there are dwemer ruins here and there, I'm only going to place money on areas the two dwemer groups made their home, Hammerfell and Morrowind (borders don't count). If it's on some wiki that says the dwemer were everywhere, take it with a mountain of salt.

As fate would have it, I just found "Secrets of Dwemer Animunculi" in one of those ruins... I think it had vampires in it?

Anyway, it lets you summon them... How do you summon a machine? I understand summoning bound weapons and armor because they contain the anima/animus of a Daedroth, but to summon a machine seems like something completely different.

Also an Animunculus has some manner of sentience. As far as I know, there's no type of clock movement I can think of that can instill a sense of good-guy/bad-guy judgement.

The Dwemer in general, remind me of Babylonians/Mesopotamians. I can't remember exactly where I read it or heard about it, but I can swear there's some vague reference in Babylonian mythology to automatons or homonculi or golems or something like that. If you look at their ghosts, they even have that Babylonian beard thing going. I know Bethesda's lifted things from the Epic of Gilgamesh, so I wouldn't put it past them to use other sources from that era and culture.

http://www.imperial-library.info/dwemer/dwemer-image.jpg
http://www.qacps.k12.md.us/mms/george/gilgamesh.htm

What's so implausible about summoning a Centurion? I mean, we can summon Daedra even in their own home plane, and when summoned, they retain whatever weapons and armor they had. I don't think it's a stretch to summon something non-living from somewhere else on Nirn.

Edit: And the book is found in http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Galom_Daeus, main hideout of the Berne Clan.

Summoning a Centurion would be like summoning a fork. The only way I can think of that would make summoning them plausible would be if they head some sort of mechanical spirit inside them.

*queue Hellmouth for 40k reference*

Perhaps things don't necessarily require a spirit to be summoned. I mean, when we summon Dremora or Golden Saints, we don't just get a Daedra, we get a Daedra plus the armor and weaponry they're carrying. Just subtract the Daedra from the equation.

A summoned Daedroth will pull his weapons through with him. If you summoned the weapons too, the summoning spells would be different for Daedra that carry different weapons and armor.

The Usual explanation I've seen is that summoning the steam-bot is just a cheap alternative to what your really doing, which is getting one of the things to obey you somehow. (kinda like that robot fighting league guy in Mournhold)

I don't think it's ever been said that you can only summon something with a soul or spirit, after all, you can summon undead, which are just animated corpses (except ghosts, of course).

The undead are animated only by magic, by breaking the laws of Arkay.

Machines are completely different.

Centurions probably have magic or involved in their creation or enchantment, as I doubt that the Dwemer had the means to create such a robot with such sophisticated behavior without the use of magic.

They were excellent programmers, that's what Crimson Pally. Magic/Locational Powering was just a battery.

If it was just the Dwemer making them, perhaps, but the Telvanni are able to make them with just knowledge from that one book. Plus Baladas, who was able to order one to leave him and go with the PC. They may be excellent mages and enchanters, but I can't imagine them to have programming skills too.

A wizard did it >.>

You know what? I think they have homing beacons. No, wait! They have portable recall devices! And the only way to summon one is to understand the frequency by which the device operates, and that knowledge is only learned within the pages of that book. As for the subleties of the frequency code, it's probably a numeric value, and you know what they say about mathematics; it's the universal language. The recall frequency could be adapted into a summoning spell, as the batteries that power the Centurion must come from somewhere, and as things usually turn out, they're either soul gems or composed of energy siphoned from Oblivion. While the soul gem theory could easily be adapted, seeing as how they've done it before on a much larger scale, the Oblivion energy would definately corroborate my theory of an adapted summoning spell.

Now that I think of it, how are undead summoned? It's not like you summon them, and they pop out of the ground.

I thought summon undead was the easy way around necromancy.

That's one of the things that bothered me, that you could never play a full-fledged necromances and reanimate corpses.

But when you summon the undead, where do they come from? The Malbioge?

You summon some random dead body somewhere and reanimate it, or some skelly wandering in some ruin.

Well, conjuration, as I see it, is supposed to be taking something somewhere (like Oblivion) and bringing it where the caster it (Mundus). An example would be summoning a scamp, where in the process where it ends up being "You are now my slave, daedroth! OBEY!" Though sometimes the daedroth is like "wtf? [censored] I'm gunna make your life hard now," and wrecks the place and maybe kills the summoner.

I like that book, "The Doors of Oblivion" just because it discusses the finer points of summoning. What I haven't seen discussed much though is the use of protonymics in summoning. Technically, wouldn't it be the most sure fire way to summon and control any Daedroth, even a Prince?

I think in the Peryite quest in OB, his followers attempted something like that, and...it backfired horridly.

I think one thing people forget about is that fang lair a dwemer ruin lays close to the skyrim boarder and during the war of Bend'r-mahk skyrim regained territory it still holds as of the end of the third era(don't know what happend afther the oblivion crisis). Its reasonable to assume that some dwemer ruins may lay on the skyrim/hammerfell boarder.

There were dwemer who lived in Hammerfell, so it's quite probable there will be ruins along the border of MW-Skyrim and HF-Skyrim.

I just had a great thought. What if when the Dwemer were assembling Numidium they went door-to-door to al all the partial-Dwemer trying to convince them "help build" Numidium's plating.

"The ruins of the lost Dwemer race are found everywhere in Tamriel, but are most common in Morrowind, once the native land of the Dwemer."http://www.imperial-library.info/sites/default/files/The%20Elder%20Scrolls%20Treasury%20Vol.%20III%20Ed.%201.pdf

Damn it!

Hence the Orrery in Cyrodiil. If they wanted, Bethesda could put in a Dwemer ruin anywhere, really, and they would likely manage to come up with a good explanation.

EDIT: I mean a good reason beyond 'The Dwemer are cool, mysterious and interesting," of course.