Show HN: The Roman Industrial Revolution that could have been (Vol 2)

Show HN: The Roman Industrial Revolution that could have been (Vol 2)(thelydianstone.com)

43 points by miki_tyler 72 days ago | 35 comments

A few months ago I shared the first issue of The Lydian Stone Series here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44253083

It's an alternate-history comic about an archaeology student in modern Pompeii who discovers a slate that lets him exchange short messages with a Roman slave a week before the eruption of Vesuvius.

The premise is simple: what happens if someone in the Roman world suddenly gains access to modern scientific knowledge, but still has to build everything using the materials and tools available in 79 AD?

Volume 2 (The Engine of Empire) explores the second-order effects of that idea.

About the process: I write the story, research, structure, and dialogue. The narrative is planned first (acts → scenes → pages → panels). Once a panel is defined, I write a detailed visual description (camera angle, posture, lighting, environment, etc.).

LLMs help turn those descriptions into prompts, and image models generate sketches. I usually generate many variations and manually select or combine the ones that best match the panel.

The bulk of the work is in the narrative design, historical research, and building a plausible technological path the Romans could realistically follow. The AI mostly acts as a sketching assistant.

I'd love feedback on the story direction, pacing, and whether the industrial shift feels believable.

sfRattan 72 days ago |

Reminds me of Lest Darkness Fall[1], a 1939 novel about an archeology professor who is transported back in time to Rome under the Ostrogoths on the eve of Belisarius' invasion to reconquer Italy for the Eastern Roman Empire under Justinian.

The hero of the novel, Martin Padway, gets his start teaching Arabic numerals to a Syrian banker in Rome, and then distilling brandy. By the end of the novel he's running a newspaper and has a semaphore telegraph network set up throughout Italy. Good fun reading.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lest_Darkness_Fall

20k 72 days ago | |

This isn't dissimilar to deathworld 2, where a futuristic guy crashlands on a planet and has to reinvent modern technology for a mongolian style culture. I'm a big fan

sfRattan 72 days ago | | |

There's also The Lost Regiment[1] series, about a Maine regiment from the American Civil War transported to an alien planet. They discover that medieval Russian peasants were previously transported there and now live as serfs/peasants under nomadic alien warlords (IIRC the aliens periodically cull the humans for food). The Union boys, in tremendously fun if a bit predictable style, lead a peasant rebellion against the aliens.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Regiment

miki_tyler 72 days ago | |

I know Lest Darkness Fall. It’s great. Someone recommended it in the Hacker News thread when I posted the first volume, so I read it after that.

Obscurity4340 72 days ago | |

Thanks for the rec, sounds like a hoot

cyberax 72 days ago |

This kind of fiction is pretty popular in Russia. So there are websites and forums that discuss the kind of hand-waving needed to make the stories interesting (I recommend https://www.popadancev.net/ ).

And one thing that really stands out is that there are really not that many shortcuts. To build something like a steam engine, you need to invent advanced steelmaking, casting, advanced tooling (lathes, drills, etc.), and so on.

In general, ancient people were able to exploit the tech available to them with great efficiency.

There are some technologies that were overlooked longer than they should have, but not that many. For example, rubber could have been invented 400 years earlier. Hooke had a microscope capable of resolving micro-organisms in 1665, but the germ theory of diseases took 300 more years to develop.

Starman_Jones 72 days ago | |

> And one thing that really stands out is that there are really not that many shortcuts.

Completely agree, but the one exception that really stands out to me is canning. Napoleon offered a large cash prize for a cheap and effective method of preserving food for use as army rations. The method used (canning) doesn't require any special equipment (glass jars or tin cans are nice, but not necessary). It would have theoretically been possible to discover this thousands of years earlier. What would have happened if Hannibal or Pyrrhus or Cyrus offered the reward instead?

cyberax 71 days ago | | |

One problem with canning is actually the material for cans. Without glass, you'll have to use ceramic jugs. They will be more difficult to sterilize and seal properly.

Definitely not impossible, but probably not discoverable without the knowledge of germ theory.

miki_tyler 72 days ago | |

I actually disagree a bit. The whole premise of the story is that there are shortcuts indeed, when someone has the entire tech tree available at the push of a button.

The Romans were very capable engineers. If you give them a few key ideas and steer them away from dead ends, progress can compress a lot.

TheOtherHobbes 72 days ago | | |

But the economics don't work. A bronze steam engine would have been extremely expensive and it would have taken multiple attempts to work out the best alloy mix. Without refinement the result would have had a low power output and short working life.

Even if you have a blueprint, a bronze engine is still a major research project.

cyberax 72 days ago | | |

You certainly can avoid a lot of dead ends, but we're still talking about the span of at the very least multiple decades.

And the next question is practicality. You can make a steam engine demonstrator from bronze. But bronze was expensive, and of varying quality. So your engine will necessarily be low-power, and too inefficient for practical use.

hunterpayne 72 days ago | | |

Two things:

1) This idea has been debunked...a lot. The Romans were capable but they were nowhere near an industrial revolution

2) Necessity is the mother of invention. The Romans didn't really need an industrial revolution, or at least their power base didn't.

Animats 72 days ago | | |

This is do-able, because it doesn't require much metalworking. This is technology from 1700-1750 or so, made from wood with a few metal bits. Roman technology was capable of that.

actionfromafar 72 days ago | |

It should have been possible to create electricity with waterwheels. You ”only” need copper.

burnt-resistor 72 days ago |

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbegal_aqueduct_and_mills

Albeit 2nd-3rd c. AD

Featured in Connections "Faith in Numbers" S1E04 1978

https://youtu.be/z6yL0_sDnX0

wildzzz 72 days ago |

I like the premise but the yellow-stained AI artwork really makes this hard to like more.

miki_tyler 72 days ago | |

You're only as good as the tools you use. They are improving fast though, you can already see a noticeable difference between the artwork in Volume 1 and Volume 2, and they were made about six months apart.

pests 72 days ago | | |

I don't know if this is true?

I'm pretty sure a pro is much better with amateur tools than a newb is with elite tools.

Give me the most expensive and fine art brushes and I doubt I could make anything worthy of hanging on a fridge. Bob Ross could outclass me with a napkin.

markus_zhang 72 days ago | |

I agree, somehow I really dislike that picture for reasons I’m not aware of.

idontwantthis 72 days ago |

https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus...

Great article on why the premise doesn't make sense.

miki_tyler 72 days ago | |

I know and love the Acoup Blog, and the premise of the story does not contradict what Acoup says. In fact, if you look carefully, there is an Easter egg hidden somewhere in the story about the Acoup Blog.

jcranmer 72 days ago | | |

I'm not sure that's really the case. The fundamental issue with the idea of a Roman Industrial Revolution isn't that Rome didn't have the technical antecedents (although that's still a big issue), but rather that the Industrial Revolution only solves problems that Rome didn't have.

One of the big, if easy, mistakes to make about history is to assume that a historical society is just like modern society at a lower tech level. Bret Devereaux is fond of dunking on George R. R. Martin's question "but what was Aragon's tax policy like?" as malformed because Gondor is a polity that doesn't really have the capacity to have a tax policy in the first place (it's pretty clearly modeled off of something like the Byzantine state). Not that Tolkien is immune from this either--the Shire suffers from being a Victorian-era English countryside being transplanted to a ~15th century tech level.

LastTrain 72 days ago |

Creative content should be labeled as AI generated, assisted, or AI free up front.

userbinator 72 days ago | |

I think people should find out themselves, but the OP was quite explicit about it.

LastTrain 71 days ago | | |

That’s great that you feel that way!

jacquesm 72 days ago |

Isn't there a massive contradiction here though, on the one hand the slave can't write on the lintel and be seen in the future proving their worlds are not connected (vol 1 page 18), on the other hand there are all these artifacts that get dug up, proving that they are. Or am I misunderstanding something?

miki_tyler 72 days ago | |

Their universes disconnect the moment they make contact, but Marcus knows Pompeii well and escapes the eruption just before it happens. So he can point Ulyses to places where things will be buried or hidden.

I also needed the relationship to go both ways, not just Marcus getting ideas from the future. That makes the plot more interesting.

jacquesm 72 days ago | | |

Ah I see, so it's 'another earth' repackaged, except they're displaced in time. I see now. What a lot of effort this must have been.