Sentinel did have gunpowder correct?

http://www.imperial-library.info/dfbooks/b070_jokes.shtml

"Cannon" CAN mean a weapon that fires heavy projectiles. doesn't have to be gunpowder powered. That said, they probably meant the gunpowder kind.

Note that lore in past games gets kinda semi-retconned or just plain ignored/removed in later games.

Jokes Books are jokes. Mockery, in some way. Not really taken serious as a source to begin with.

This has been anolyzed before - I think it's generally agreed that any mentions of cannons in Daggerfall are not, well, canon (puns).

Is everything written correct lore?

No

Generally, everything written in Oblivion is, yes. Most everything in Morrowind, yes. Daggerfall needs a fine grain of salt, and Arena needs a very coarse grain of salt. Fit the other games in as you see fit.

^ I was so hoping to meet Laryngitis in-game.

Everything that is written is believed by some NPC, somewhere.

As we know, the Dwemer are gone and I'm sure they had gunpowder. Maybe the art of it was lost with them?

and that statement is completely unfounded, and based completely on an assumption that's technology = gunpowder, which is extremely foolish. The dwemer didn't built tech. for the sake of advancing it. They did, so they can ascend metaphysically. That was the whole point of their denial of Mundus, the power of the gods, and why they constructed the Numidium. Plus, they didn't have cannons. Instead it was ballistas

They had some manner of explosive (see Tribunal), though there's no statement that it's gunpowder, and my guess is that if they used it for anything, they used it for mining.

That I won't deny

Yeah, sure, why not? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombard_%28weapon%29 have existed for a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannon_in_the_Middle_Ages. The metalworking skills exhibited by many cultures in TES is perfectly compatible with the creation of such cannons. What's more difficult is the creation of small firearms. Even so, primitive portable firearms, such as the culverins, were used as early as the Hundred Years War. But it took a long period of refinement and improvement before they began to be more useful than a bow or a crossbow.

Now in Tamriel, cannons of all size face competition not just from mundane weapons such as catapults, ballistas, onagers, crossbows, bows, slings, atlatls and blowpipes, but also from spells. It is so easy for so many people to just throw fireballs that the development of gunpowder weapons is going to progress slowly.

The restless league used blackpowder(?) too, not just the dwemer. I think its one of those examples of "of course they exist, and we shouldn't need to tell you".

Cyrus does ignite a barrel with explosives in them on a wrecked ship, but that's the only mention of exploding barrels of something in Redguard I could find :shrug:

There are explosions in the background, during the last cutscene with Dram and Richton.
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by the way, Chaos is for pansies

True.
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Oh and the greater good is a lie, and the tau are are of the biggest pansies of 40k