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[Gigabytebob]

I have seen alot of talk about black powder guns like muskets blunderbuss and hand cannons. but not a whole lot of talk about cannons my idea is that they will be siege weapons made of any metal or stone the stronger the materiel the less chance of it exploding sending bits of shrapnel into your dwarves and must be stuffed with gunpowder every time you fire it and cannon balls oh cannon ball will be FUN there will 2 types explosive and non explosive they can be made out of any metal or stone same thing like the cannons the better the materiel less chance of it breaking but there are advantages of using a weak materiel like if there is a stone ball being shot out of a candy cannon it mite shoot out shrapnel at the enemy or if it does get shot it mite break mid air or break on impact but if you were to shoot a weak explosive ball it mite explode when being shot out and send shrapnel into your dwarves and if the explosive ball hits its target it will explode into shrapnel and if non explosive ball hits its target it will do alot of blunt damage with a very high chance of death   

[Shonai_Dweller]

There's not much talk (recently) of them, because Toady seemed to be not to keen to have them in the game at one point. Blowing stuff up will be added, but leave cannons to modders was the original thinking.

That was revised later to 'ships have cannons' so will have to consider more.

And now it's 'mundane worlds with only humans' as a possibility with huge variance in worlds. So the concept of "vanilla" Dwarf Fortress is a lot more flexible.

And I guess non-magical humans should be allowed to blow stuff up too, right?

Anyhow, its been suggested a lot of times before, so Toady's not unaware of the pros and cons of cannons.

[Starver]

As to material, why not also allow wood?

(I'm not sure I'm ready for gunpowder in vanilla DF. Even combative ship 'cannons' I would imagine shoupd be still more like (if not actually) ballistae or catapults, sprung-loaded launchers of one sort or other.)

[FantasticDorf]

There's some intrinsic production & game issues currently with how cannons could be implemented that need solutions first.

Gunpowder: How will we aquire it in the game (whether there's prerequisite steps) and keep it relevant as a resource to gather and hoard before the player is introduced to cannons.

Velocity: Velocity in DF is one of the most important aspects of ranged combat, perfectly demonstrated by blowdarts; blowdarts of respective materials can effectively penetrate most armors more competently than bows & crossbow bolts and arrows because they are fired with much more force and focus a much

- Now lets say that in a fantasy scenario, a dwarf literally carries a cannon underneath is its arm and shoots small but full size cannonball at someone with a extreme amount of velocity, the projectile is going to fly fast, have a wide contact area and hit like a full strength flying hammer, downsizing the gun or ammunition will recieve the same results

- Shotgun shells are just little balls shot with maximum amount of force to shred, cannon ammunition used to be like that with grapeshots.

Destroying landscape: On the roadmap but not there yet, smashing a large creature into meaty gibbets or punching its teeth out causes enough item-spam and lag already, defining each individual tile that is affected, how much damage is taken to it and where it should fly off and land are technical challenges.

Im not totally against cannons but there needs to be a lot more arguements about the feasability of its presentation & execution so it can slip into the game & the lore world without offsetting everything with a arms race to develop the better weapon. A catapult fufills the current purpose of bombarding people (offensive use yet to be seen), a ballista works like a culvering for anti-infantry, and crossbows are essentially as powerful as they need to be.

So naturally you can see, a cannon (siege,hand,regular) is just a expensive and metal intensive improvement on the arnaments with the power to severely make things onesided. We'll know what toady has envisioned for it when boats eventually roll by.