So the Romans had steam power, crank, cylinder, piston, valves

what need would an empire that essentially consisted of ports on the Mediterranean Sea with slaves doing all of the undesirable work have for trains?

>>1807279
So you can transport legions from Sicily to Germania. Duh.

And establish a silk road trade line with China via the Steppes. But you would have to mount scorpions on them to protect the trains from roving bands of Sarmatians.

>>1807279
Ease grain distribution, from inland to the coast? Trains go fast.

Point of order.

The Romans didn't have steam power. An inventor in one of the hellenistic kingdoms invented a steam powered toy that couldn't produce enough torque to accomplish anything useful.

But yeah, they had extremely sophisticated machining capability. They even made watertight pistons for their pumps.

>you will never see greco-roman steam powered ships designed to ram other ships.

>>1807474
>steam power gets invented before gunpowder

Now there's a setting with the potential for a lot of weirdness.

>>1807478
Could easily happen... The Amer-Indians invented metallurgy before the wheel, after all. (And large scale steam power actually requires a level of metallurgy the Romans did not have.)

>>1807478

Sounds pretty cool if you ask me.

>>1807478
Steam powered siege weaponry

>>1807489
The Romans could just buy steel from the forges in India.

Expensive though.

Also, you'd hopefully be showing them how to do the open hearth process at the same time.

>>1807885
I'm picturing the Fire-nation tanks now.

>>1807260
>steam power
I fucking hate this meme. They had very niche toys that spun around from steam, not anything resembling a steam engine.

They also lacked the vulcanized rubber needed for industrialization, too.

>>1808256
I'm pretty sure they lacked rubber in general let alone vulcanized rubber.

>>1808256
They had piston based pumps that worked.

And steam engines and railroads predate vulcanization by quite some time.

>>1808268
That is true yes, since rubber is a New World plant, but even if they did have it they didn't have any knowledge of how to vulcanize it.

>>1808269
Piston pump powered by what?

A teacher once told me that the romans were so reliant on slave labor that they should have been able to come up with steam engines but didn't because of the slaves
Idk tho

>>1808273
Humans.

It worked by using a watertight piston to create a vacuum that pumped water, and then a non-return valve that would force the water to expel out into another pipe rather than back into the mine.

No real reason you couldn't use the same piston, cylinder, and valves to convert hot steam into mechanical work.

Song China was closer to industrialization than Rome ever was.

>>1808298
>Humans.
Exactly the problem.

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>>1807260
But Rome did industrialize?

>>1808274
It's not that they were reliant as much as slavery was just so infinitely cheaper than the time and energy it would take to discover, refine, and build the new steam powered equipment (Again, assuming they can find clever workarounds to some problems such as "No rubber").

>>1808308
I'm not 100% sure you know how an engine works.

Because if you have gearing, cylinders, pistons, and valves, you can build one.

>>1808317
Not if it's cheaper and easier to have humans power most everything.

>>1807260
They had shit steel.

>>1808324
Nigga, that's never the case.

Humans will literally never be cheaper in terms of cost/horsepower.

For bulk power, the Romans used watermills and draft animals. Humans were only used for specialized applications like operating cranes or rowing warships, where for whatever reason you needed something intelligent to make it work.

>>1808336
Depends on how expandable manpower is.
If manpower is scarce, and technology is developed, technology can be cheaper.

That doesn't change that a army with a few thousand members could just each take a buckets, and a few trips of moving sand later, there is literally a large hill.

>>1807329
Could it not have been possible for people to use aqueducts to transport grain somehow?

Everyone forgets about the canals. England built shittons of them during industrialization. Roman transport was based around the mediterranean. Water transport is still the most efficient means available, and it's steam capable whenever that comes around. The Romans actually did pursue this route, several attempts to rebuild the Nile canal were one of the sticking points with the Sassanids (who were afraid of losing their silk trade monopoly).

Charlegmagne (in his capacity as emperor) tried to link the Rhine and the Danube, but the inability of the new regime to successfully complete such a task told that true Roman civilization had been lost. During the same time period, the Sui were building the grand canal. It's a test of civilization, being able to do hydraulic works.

>>1808356
See, this is something we can actually test.

Because the Romans had shit like grain milling, and transporting bulk goods.

The Romans would always, as a rule, use water power and animals to mill their grain whenever possible, wind for sea transport of goods, and animals to pull carts on land.

At a Roman construction site, you'd actually see the equivalent of modern loading docks where the carts would unload their goods and then workmen would pick shit up and walk it through the site to its destination.

>>1808362
Kinda hard to build an aqueduct to transport stuff from Egypt to Rome.

>>1808385

>Kinda hard to build an aqueduct to transport stuff from Egypt to Rome.

It already exists it's called the medi

>>1808470
Kind of hard to drop a cork in the Nile and have it show up on the Tiber.

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>WE WVS STEAMPVNKS AND SHEVT

>>1808524
>The girl who just brought a stuffed llama
It is a pretty cute llama though.

Jesus Christ. Threads like this really annoy me.

Why is /his/ full of literal children who think history progresses in a linear fashion?

>>1807260
The state of their Metallurgy was no were near the needed level. Their steam engine was just a court toy. To get get it to a useful size they would of needed at the very lest the blast furnace.

>>1808592
because that is how it works in vidya, basically

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>>1807322
Holy shit man fucking shooting people with a giant ass crossbow on a moving Roman train would have been incredible

>>1808592
Relax autismo, it's just something to think about. Go make another Stalingrad or fucking battle axe thread if it bothers you so much

>>1807322
>>1807322
It sounds like an alternative Western movie, boner.jpg

>>1808592
Isn't this thread the opposite of that? its speculating if steam power may have came about early under different conditions. As one anon put it...

>steam power gets invented before gunpowder

Its not lineal if its out of order. Unless you are saying that unless under the exact same conditions as it actually happened, the train would never get invented by anybody.

>>1808312
>
>
>

>>1807322
Fuuug

I feel like drawing this now. I wonder what roman steam powered trains would look like though.

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>>1808312

Don't make me say it

>>1808816

Probably something like a row of wooden wagons hitched together, getting pulled by the engine cart along a rail or track of some sort.

Yes but the judeo-christians literally destroyed Rome. They blame it on germanics tho because all christians are crypto-kikes in disguise.

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>>1808312
Wrong image anon, but Rome did industrialize!

>>1808524
What's with the nigga in full body armor and a mask

>>1809281
He's into Fallout but his girlfriend is into steampunk so they compromised?

Also there's the Imperial Guardsman over on the far right.

>>1808473

That's what boats are for.

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>>1809281

Do you even need to ask?

>>1811187
I'm not sure you understand what an aqueduct is.

It's not the same thing as a canal.

>>1809017

Ottoman empire didn't even exist in 1000.

>>1807279

>slavery impared devolopment

absolute meme
especially since Rome couldn't pillage the amount of slaves like it used to

>>1811194
First movie I ever saw on Netflix.
Worst movie I ever saw on Netflix.

>>1811217
The funniest part is that it's the highest rated movie Uwe Boll ever produced.

>>1808256
if you can make something spin by steam, you could power something with it. Put an axle on it, connect the axle to some wheels, bam, steam powered cart.

>>1808356
>Depends on how expandable manpower is.
Never ever more expendable than animals. Never ever cheaper either, because humans need much higher levels of living arrangements and oversight, which are expensive. And if engines are more effective than animal power...

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>>1811198

I'm not saying that oceans are aqueducts, I'm saying that oceans are better than aqueducts.