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[irmo]

The fact that gunpowder would be "expensive" is meaningless.  I mean sure we have balance problems and sure nobody would be forced to use it, but any ten-year-old fort can crank out just about anything with essentially no limits...

It has to be "expensive" in the sense of requiring materials that are available in a finite supply and not tradeable. The obvious candidate for this is sulfur, because it's a mineral, while everything else can be cooked up in unlimited amounts. (It's not tradeable because it's literally priceless--nobody who has a supply of it would trade it for anything else. It's like weapons-grade uranium.)

[Rysith]

Something to consider here is separating the "seismology" from the "(using explosives)". I think that regardless of the existence of dynamite, dwarves pounding on the walls and listening to them to figure out what is in them fits perfectly well into a fantasy setting, and would be really useful as an alternative to exploratory mining.

Perhaps it's a task, perhaps its a side-effect of cave-ins, but I could see it revealing the existence of things other than the base rock within a certain radius. ("there is a vein here, a large cluster here, and a few small clusters over there"). With the coming underground features, it seems like it would be really useful to prevent miners from tunneling through the ceilings of things and falling to their deaths.

And irmo, sulfur is already in in the form of brimstone.

[Ethidium]

I agree with Sordid - really not looking forward to the appearance of magic in the game. I prefer the grittier, more realistic world without magic. The whole point of dwarves in fantasy is that they use technology rather than magic, even where it is an option. Explosives are less obtrusive. You think dynamite is "too modern"? Fine, call it sth else - "a rose by any other name..."

imo, high explosives like nitroglycerine are to be preferred over things like gunpowder because they can be considered too powerful to safely use in firearms without modern metallurgy. The chemistry is actually very simple - nitric acid and glycerin both existed on earth for centuries before the actual development of nitroglycerine... it's something of a Columbus' egg, and could feasibly have been developed with the kind of technology available thousands of years ago

Also, i really like Alfie's flood/mining idea for the explosions. Seismology also requires a large shockwave, but chucking in a few randomly located cave-ins and throwing nearby objects away from the blast would get that just right (and allow grenade-fishing)

anyway - it's pointless to discuss it, if Toady has already spoken out on this (thanks for the quote Footkerchief). We'll just have to see what happens.

[Sordid]

Even gunpowder is too dangerous to use without modern metalurgy, it wasn't unheard of for early cannons and firearms to explode.

Oh, and while we're on the subject..... Greek fire anyone?