How about smoke coming from guns after their fired, after a few shots in a 2x2 hallway it should be impossible to see from more than 2 sqaures away if your in the smoke.In a 2x2 hallway the smoke should only spread 5 squares in either direction It would also take time to reload depending on what type of gun it is. If it was a arquebus type gun it should take the game equivalent of a minute to reload. If if was a blunderbuss it should take maybe half that. If the dwarf has a good level in gun shooting the time it takes to reload should go down some.
The bullets would be made in the masons workshop out of rock or the forge made out of some type of metal. The rock ones should break up in the air half the time and not do as mutch damage because their so weak. The metal ones should do more damage than the rock ones and be able to fire more actually.
The powder would be made in an alchemists workshop out of Saltpeter, charcoal, and sulfur. Saltpeter can be made via potash, among other methods. Charcoal already occurs in the game, and sulfur should be found near the magma river.
The powder and the shot would be made into packets in the clothes workshop. You could make ten packets out of a single piece of fabric. The packets would be kept in a pouch able to hold 30 packets. If the packets got wet they would become useless.
The guns would be assembled at a mechanics workshop and the dwarf who assembles it will get experience in the gunsmith skill. If the maker has a low gunsmith skill the gun should be more prone to break and to missfire. The gun would be made of one block of wood two mechanisms and one barrel and not the one your thinking of, the only thing this barrel will feed you is lead (or talc ). The barrels would be made at a metal smiths forge and only made of iron or a metal stronger than that.
Now that iv explained the production of guns I'll get into how the dwarves would use them.Any one asigned to use a firearm would pick up a sachle and put packets in it. If a dwarf was off duty with it he would go to the shooting range and practice. They should be able to practice on the same targets archers use. Every shot that hits the target should chip away at it. After about 50 shots the target should break. It should be pretty hard for a dwarf to learn how to use the gun properly. If a dwarf is walking with his gun in his hand or his holster every step should have a chance to missfire.The chance of a missfire should be very small and only happen rarely,the chance would increase or decrease depending on the guns quality level. If a gun missfires a bullet will either fly in what ever direction the person was walking in,giving an amount of damage to what ever it his including other dwarves, or shoot the person in the foot.
As the gun is fired over and over it starts to get dirty. Eventually it should make it less acurate or less deadly. As well as getting dirty the pieces should also start to get weaker until they finally break. If the pieces are high quiality they shouldnt get broken as fast. The mechanics workshop should have a job called "clean firearms" where every gun that is dirty gets sent to the shop to get cleaned. There should also be a "repair firearms" button that does the same only replaces any broken piece.
Lets see...am I forgetting anything? Ah yes I haven't covered explosive mining yet.
You should be able to take a barrel of gun powder and set a timer on it with mechanisms. The barrel would be fitted with two mechanisms in the mechanics workshop. If the barrel was made with bad quiality items or was put together badly there should be a chance that every step a dwarf takes moving the thing would blow it up. After one of your dwarves puts the barrel where you built it(it gets built like a statue)there should be a task like a lever that you could set where a dwarf walks up to the bomb and sets it to explode. After its been armed it cant be stopped. it would give you enough time for your dwarves to get away. When it explodes it should blast away about 7 tiles in each direction. Any ore or rocks closer than 3 tiles to the bomb should explode but any rock farther than that should just get pushed back. It should also shoot fire out, maybe about 10 or 11 tiles. As for using it in traps I don't care either way seeing as i probly wont use it as a trap even if it was in.
Yep I think thats all i wanted to say.
-edit- Oh wow maby I should have started a whole new topic. This block of text is huge
[ October 08, 2007: Message edited by: FlamingKittenMittin ]