Hero of Alexandria made a tea kettle that could spin around on an axle, and that's pretty much all the aeolipile was. Now, within 20 years of Hero's tea kettle, in this timeline there's a guy who's managed to make a working steamer-- one that, while it did capsize, managed to nonetheless produce enough force to move the ship forward.
Here, Palonius has managed to build all that without being able to measure the temperature of the firebox, without being able to measure the pressure of steam in the boiler, without knowing the strength of the metals he's working with, without even having
algebra to work with. If asked, he could not reproduce a quarter of the data in, say,
Oliver Evan's guide to steam engineering, because he still has no way of measuring
anything of his own engines.
I'm still not sure if Palonius' engines are more like Newcomen's or Watt's engines, but even so it took 60 years of development after Papin's pressure cooker for someone to make a Newcomen-engine powered steamer that worked decently (Papin's own model managed to move a few kilometers down the calm Fulda river thirty years after he made the pressure-cooker, but nothing came of it) and just about a century after Papin's pressure cooker for someone to make a workable steamer based off James Watt's engine-- and that was with them all being able to actually measure and calculate things!