Saturday, July 25, 2020

Roman Battle Galleons


What if Rome never fell and they went on to conquer the world with motorized battle galleys? This concept plays out in Kirk Mitchell's science fiction series, Procurator. This was one of the preliminary sketches.

The final painting was a wraparound cover of a sand galley, an open-topped troop carrier, battle platform, and siege weapon built along the lines of a trireme.
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1 comment:

Eugene Arenhaus said...

With all respect, James, and not going into discussion of limited-to-the-point-of-nonexistence utility of landcruisers, and even less limited utility of spears on a tank, I don't believe that Romans would ever do such a thing. :D

Ancient Romans were superstitious, all right, and so did some rather strange things for ritualistic reasons, but they were quite efficient as engineers and inventors. Their military tactics were advanced, but their armaments were quite minimalistic wherever they could get away with it. And most of their wars on the continent had been fought against enemies with less organization and, in the later periods, less advanced armament, so there would be no reason for something like this to evolve. Now, their navy was quite advanced because they had to fight more advanced enemies on the Mediterranean, as far as relying on flamethrowers later on in the Eastern Roman Empire.

Not that it's not a really cool image, of course. ;)