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Baughn comments on A rationalist My Little Pony fanfic - Less Wrong
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Making firearms is not actually that easy. The 3D-printed one was actually just part of a firearm, and not the part that takes the highest stresses.
Missy should, in practice, have had at least the following problems:
For a breech-loading firearm, you need high-grade steel of a particular and uniform formulation. Up until quite recently, humanity did not understand the chemistry of steel well enough to do that. Ponyland is unlikely to. The alternative, unfortunately, may be the firearm blowing up in your face.
Very particular chemistries are required for the propellant. Gunpowder is hard to set fire to, makes smoke, and doesn't provide much energy. The modern ideal of a propellant that explodes when hit hard, doesn't explode when hit even slightly lighter, doesn't explode if heated, doesn't explode under production, doesn't explode if you cool it down and doesn't randomly explode if you stare at it is.. actually pretty hard to manage. You also want it to not produce too much smoke. Guncotton is one of the better alternatives at your tech level, but it involves nitroglycerin.. 'nuff said.
If you're interested in the details of recreating modern science, I suggest you look up the 1632 series; the writers have done a lot of careful research. For what it's worth, though, even doing a two-century jump (to late 1800s tech) is still a multi-year project when supplied with thousands of modern people, tens of thousands of down-timers, and a small modern city.
It wasn't the part that takes the highest stresses, but it -is- the part which is identified as the firearm in the US - sort of like the motherboard isn't the component of the computer which takes the highest stresses (that would be the processor), but is the part which is recognized by an OS as the computer. Additionally, it takes little machining skill to finish the gun from that point out of supplies you can find in most hardware stores. (Much less assembling the rest of the gun out of unregulated parts.)
Smokeless gunpowder is only desirable if you care about being spotted. Regular old gunpowder is easy to make (my chemistry lessons from my father - I was homeschooled for a substantial portion of my childhood - were very practical, and this is one of the things I learned to make.) and perfectly practical for just about every application you could want it for. Additionally, guncotton does not in fact require nitroglycerin; that's only one of the two types that can be produced. (It invariably requires large quantities of nitric and sulfuric acids, however. Nitric acid is harder to come by than the raw materials for gunpowder, especially in the quantities needed, which will generally attract law enforcement attention. It's not impossible to produce yourself, but difficult.)
Given that the firearm creation occurred some 50 chapters before what I'm writing now, and the result was successfully used for at least one plot-point, it would be a bit impractical to revise it just now. However, I can still keep these notes in case I do an eventual full rewrite; and these comments can be useful for filling in some as-yet-undescribed blank spots, such as helping to explain why none of the other game-pieces have managed to assemble their own modern firearms.
In case it was buried where some LessWrongers here didn't read it, the point in the story that goes into the most detail about arranging for the creation of a firearm is in chapter 13, and reads:
So, trying to take as a given that the single firearm was, in fact, successfully built, then the next time I write about it, I could try describing the additional difficulties currently being described, and how overcoming those difficulties was accomplished.
For example, at that point in the story, the main character had access to the capital city's top engineers and technicians, as well as the local magically-enhanced forges and manufacturing techniques. So while the gun itself may be entirely non-magical in its operation, Equestria might not be able to manufacture it without applying magic during the metal-casting processes. (Or something of the sort.) In general, Equestrian technology is roughly in the 1850's-1870's range, with various exceptions (eg, sound systems, airships) that often turn out to have a magical base.
Another background detail that is potentially useful for such not-quite-retconning is that the Princess to whom all this was being described has been shown to be able to collect information by appearing in other people's dreams. It's possible that she used this technique to help gather details that the protagonist didn't know she knew, to help fill out any blanks required for proper manufacturing.