Comment by jcranmer
> Grateful for any thoughts on pacing, historical plausibility, or character depth.
Originally, I thought you were suggesting an endogenous Roman industrial revolution, which, no, that's not historically plausible (see https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus... for details as to why). But on a closer reread, I found that you're talking instead about Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court-style introduction of the Industrial Revolution to the past. Which... probably still no?
There's a few factors that make Roman Industrial Revolution unlikely. It's dubious that the Romans had the technology to make a working pressure cylinder necessary for a steam engine--that requires some degree of precision engineering that I don't think they had. But there's other missing technologies: for examples, the Romans lack the spinning wheel (it would be invented ~1000 years later), and even more importantly, their looms likely aren't up to the production capacity that automatic thread production would enable. It's not implausible that this is part of future-tech-transfer, but getting this tech transferred would require a decent amount of specialized knowledge not easily available to either person here.
More importantly, I don't think the Roman economy is really at a stage that can handle an industrial revolution. Most production is still relying essentially on local production. A shortage of wool workers isn't an "oh no, we have too much wool, how ever are we going to turn it into yarn?" problem; rather, it's a "whelp, we've got nobody to deal with all the sheep" problem.
The final note is that your plan for the inevitable old-versus-new conflict is... well, "industrial revolution turns everyone into Revolutionary American liberals" is a summary of that idea, and I don't think that's anywhere near an accurate read of what a Roman reaction to an industrial revolution. I'd go into more detail, but I don't trust my own knowledge of the 1st century Roman Empire sociopolitical structure is accurate enough to model what it would look like in detail.
I see your point, however, the idea is to introduce engineering knowledge from the outside. Think of the duct tape scene in Apollo 13: a group of engineers gathered around a table, someone dumps a pile of random items, and says, "We have to find a way to make this thing using nothing but that." What's the minimum set of tools and knowledge that, dropped into the Roman world, could solve a specific technological problem.