I was hoping this included things like "you fold the frame down, deploying the 'board' into '2 frames'.
So like a gangplank or mini drawbridge thingy?
cars will have roofs... that you can stand on. Have to keep that in mind.
If we're going to do boats or tall vehicles, will they also have bottoms? Or is it just assumed that any tile you build has a sturdy floor?
Not so much no, in a vehicle if you don't build one of the "floor" tiles, it's assumed to be just support structure, hence the move penalty to moving around in it. Obviously we'd have to do something to check for a hull with a boat, so you can sink it if you smash things. Probably just require a "hull" component as the base for each stack of components, and total up the number of tiles covered to assess buyoancy, not that I think that'll often be a limiting factor except on the smallest boats. Heh, folding kayak. If you build a vehicle up, again the frame components would just be bars and such, you could climb on and through them, but that'd be subject to whatever we do with climbing, which would be suboptimal for e.g. a shooting platform or a sleeping location.
Boats are a whole different thing, they're technically feasable, but kind of pointless with the macro-scale of our maps right now, especially with no way to go over bridges. Bridges will probably be bumped up a level once we have that in and that'd make the rivers mostly navagable. But even with that, it'll be a hard sell to put a lot of resources into a boat too big to portage since it's almost certain to be landlocked to only a handful of overmaps. Now that I think of it amphibious vehicles make far more sense than regular boats. Also I'm pretty sure we'd just have them be dumb and skate across the water rather than actually dealing with displacement.
Blunderbusses are flared musket like guns, and often fired bunches of shot.
And yea, we've been discussing black-powder weapons on the cataclysm forums, and on IRC for that matter. That one's only a matter of time too. Nice thing about black-powder funs* is they're far more feasable to craft yourself.
*This is a typo but I'm just going to leave it.