There were many factors that help to explain both why and how firearms were retained, augmented, or "abandoned" in different states in early modern Asia. Although the Portuguese played a role in introducing firearms across maritime Asia in the sixteenth century, in the seventeenth century different societies had to make hard choices concerning not just how to use and control the gun, but also whether to retain its use at all. The present paper builds upon the feedback, and additional fieldwork in Japan to address that feedback, to an earlier paper presented at the ICOHTEC Conference in Barcelona in 2012, to consider the role played by gunpowder and gunpowder-making technology. In particular this paper focuses on how gunpowder availability intersected with pre-existing military organisation to influence choices made about firearm technology in the case studies of Kandy, Burma, and Japan in the seventeenth century