Show HN: The Roman Industrial Revolution that could have been (Vol 2)
32 points - yesterday at 11:17 PM
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.
Comments
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.
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.
Albeit 2nd-3rd c. AD
Featured in Connections "Faith in Numbers" S1E04 1978
Great article on why the premise doesn't make sense.