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[Girlinhat]

To be fair, you can't prove there were or weren't.  You weren't there!

[TerryDactyl]

There were people who believed in things like elves and hydras, but there were no actual elves and hydras

Oh come on, where's your spirit? A 'myth' is still real in a certain sense. I mean, just because you don't believe in magic doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

Besides, races, as in DF show us there are people who live in different ways than dwarves. Which is most certainly the case in reality.

[Sfon]

Guns could be very inaccurate, take longer to reload, and have a chance of blowing up. My understanding is that their advantage was simply the ease of training soldiers to use them, as large numbers of these shoddy ranged weapons were effective. They were not even able to pierce plate armor at first.

Going up against bows and crossbows is already so dangerous, though, I don't think we need to make this worse with gun armies. Don't forget we have adventure mode, too. A major reason to not like them in fantasy is because it is easy to imagine a Hercules-esqe warrior going up against swordsmen, but the more guns enter the equation the harder it is to imagine. Notice that beat-em-ups often allow pipes and even swords but rarely guns, even if they take place in a modern or future setting. DF is supposed to be harshly realistic, but harshly realistic fantasy none-the-less. Guns break the mood.

Crude cannons would fit better in DF, imo. Take a while to set up and requiring metal parts and ammo, but could then bust constructions (bridges, unnatural walls, etc). Much slower firing rate than catapults/ballistas, making them impractical vs soldiers. They would exist to make sieges more interesting. Because they would be slow to set up and fire they would only be a threat against walling oneself in.

Bombs could serve a similar purpose. Cannons would be defeatable by building a bridge around a corner in a tight hallway. Bombs would not have this weakness, but could still be made slow to set so as to still allow constructions to not be defeated too trivially. Cannons would be better at destroying outside constructions since they could fire over pits, outside of archer range, and perhaps through fortifications. Bombs would allow destroying constructions inside natural walls and perhaps require less if any metal.

[NW_Kohaku]

I think the topic of gunpowder is pretty beaten to death (thanks for not starting a new thread on it, though). 

Toady has left comments in the raws about using things like saltpetre in gunpowder, and talked about it in response to questions about nitrates and fertilizers, so it's clearly something he has at least thought about.

It's most probable that Toady won't put guns in vanilla, but will leave all the tools in for modders to make some sort of firearms that are distinct from crossbows and bows.  Currently, there already are gun mods, but they are limited by the current game code in how different they can be from crossbows.

As for "barrels that explode", Toady has expressed interest in that sort of thing in the past.  We'll probably see that at some point down the road. 

[Buzzing_Beard]

An existing DF-theme creative anachronism:
Royal jelly production/harvest didn't exist before the 1920's AFAIK, and wasn't common until the 1950's (it's kind of a complicated process). I think Toady said it was a must-have though because it's become a staple of rogue-like games.

[Jeoshua]

Ah... exploding barrels.  Never has something seemed so logical, yet been so rediculously improbable.

Seriously, go get a steel barrel full of gasoline, take it out to a field somewhere, and pump some shotgun rounds into it.  It WILL NOT blow up.  I promise you.  I've done it.

Now, don't light a cigarette near it while you're examining it, tho... that'll doom you with those open flames near the fumes.

As for guns and armor.  Have you guys ever heard the term "Bullet-proof"?  I'm sure you have.  But nobody seems to know what it originally meant.  It was a test that was performed on plate mail.  You take gun, fire a bullet at the breastplate of the armor at point-blank range.  If it goes through, you screwed up on the plate mail.  If it makes a small dent but otherwise leaves the armor intact, it's considered to be "proven" that the armor can take a bullet.  And the little dent was called a "Bullet-Proof".

Hell, Knights carried pistols around on the side of their horse saddle, (a "side-arm"), to shoot at people while riding.  After all it's much more effective to point and shoot with a gun then to try and use a long-bow.

Speaking of which: Longbows should be more powerful than crossbows and guns.  After all, if you really look into the history, it was not the gun which ended the time of the knights, but the english long-bow.  you can't make armor strong enough to shrug off the weight behind those arrows, so they were truly devastating to the clunkilly armored knights in a way light, soft, lead bullets could never be.