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A genuine and reasonable question. I know psuedohistorians keep claiming classical/late antiquity transatlantic voyages, and real historians usually don't claim that Roman and Punic ships couldn't have made the voyage. I also know the vikings did it. I assume that means the ships could probably cross the Atlantic in good weather, although navigation technology might not have been up to snuff(I know the vikings had a few navigational techniques the Romans didn't). Hell, the Polynesians made lengthy voyages across the Pacific in the stone age, and there are a few recorded cases of Eskimos showing up in medieval Europe in kayaks.
My off the cuff opinion is that Romans who knew about trade winds and where the Americas were could have gotten here, assuming they had infrastructure built up to launch those expeditions at the right time of year. But they didn't have that kind of knowledge and they didn't try. It raises an interesting question about how the Algonquian Indians in Canada were more able to resist viking settlement than the natives of Ireland, Russia, etc.
Did Romans have proper ocean-going ships, though? Herodotus writes that Phoenicians did some cabotage sailing around Africa (and came back with bullshit stories about the Sun being in the north at noon), but were they limited by navigation or by the ship construction?
Carracks look to me like nothing the Romans had built, but caravels are small enough to be comparable with various merchant vessels of the ancient Med.
By "ocean-going" I assume you mean ships you might actually want to leave sight of land with; then the answer is no. Roman ships traded up and down the Atlantic Coast of Hispania/Gaul/Britain and across the Indian Ocean to India, but with the same kind of coast-hugging galleys they plied the Med with.
Of course this makes you wonder: well how did the Vikings get to North America then? Well they hugged the coast too. @hydroacetylene if you use the trade winds you inevitably arrive in the Americas in the tropics, not from the north like the Viking expeditions did.
The development of the caravel was a marriage of deliberate conceptual design of an oceangoing vessel that was smaller, more flexible, and more capable of weathering storms; as well as technological advances/borrowings in terms of construction and sail design. Kind of a counterfactual thing but it's not easy to imagine the Romans building them. They didn't have the need or the ability.
Well, they didn't exclusively coast-hug. They routinely attempted real crossings of the Med - going to Alexandria, Carthage/Tunis and Tripoli by coast hugging just would take much to long. Sure, those crossings aren't huge, and the Med in summer is one of the most benign waters to cross (and they pretty much stopped shipping completely in fall, the Med gets angry in winter). But still, it's sailing without sight of land for at least a day or three.
Generally whenever possible you would try to make the larger jumps within daylight so that you could see any potential bad weather coming. Obviously the Romans didn't stay off the nearest coast the whole way to Alexandria but the actual sailing routes tried to practically limit the time spent in open ocean.
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My first guess would be that Ireland is much closer, the Vikings raiding Ireland already had bases in Scotland and you can see parts of Scotland with the naked eye on a sunny day on the Antrim coast.
The distance would make any big setback or defeat fatal, it’s not like the Vikings in Canada could go seek refuge from Saxon kings or with the Norse in the Hebrides if they lost a battle.
Viking greenland was pretty close, and Iceland wasn't that far either.
If we're counting the distance from Newfoundland Iceland was still closer to Ireland by about 1100km. There were single battles in Ireland where more Vikings died than the total population of Greenland (6,000), it does seem like it was just easier to send more people to settle Ireland than Canada.
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Yeah, knowing that there's something valuable over the Americas and roughly how far you've got to go/what the weather dynamics are would likely make the process simpler.
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