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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

That’s great that you feel that way!

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.