Could WW1 have happened without the developments in the combustible engine the previous 30 years?

WW1 wasn't as mechanized as some people think especially when it first started, but if development in the combustible engine over the late 19th century were much slower and horse and other beasts of burden were still the primary methods of shorter distance troop and equipment transport (needless to say no airplanes, tanks), could a large scale world war still have occurred around the time of 1914?
 
The air war couldn't have happened. The war at sea would have been very different. Trench warfare itself was the result of the development to smokeless powder, the machine gun and barbed wire.
 
I think the main reason of the scale of the war was the steamengine. Which meant that railroads could be used to transport large amount of men, suppies and weapons near to the front.
And the industrialization meant the large amounts of weapons and ammunition could be produced.
 

Kaze

Banned
All it would be it a replay of the Napoleonic, Crimea, and the US Civil War - all that had little to no engines to power it (exception for steam power) - all were bloody affairs that took thousands of lives.
 
This is headed straight for Steampunk territory.

Steampunk Tank.png
 
Like the American civil war but with machine guns. So yes it could happen. But it would human wave.exe until one side ran out of humans to form a wave of the other side ran out of bullets.
 
There were steam powered submarines, all steam is external combustion

It's not just subs. Torpedo boats became greatly more effective as gasoline engines made them faster and lighter. A new class of ships was developed to counter them, torpedo boat destroyers or just Destroyers.
 
Coming back tobthebquestion, yes thebworld war could be fight witouth the advance of the last 30 years in internal combustion, but its have a completly diferent air war, but a more or less the same in the land and in the sea
 
It would be very much like the RJW, just deadlier, as more machine guns, mortars, artillery and gas would be used.
 
The question is what stops the development of the engine. If it is simply not discovered yet it might be something discovered in the course of the war and put into use. Meaning that by the end it would have been even more similar.

Or tanks powered by Stirling engine I guess haha
 
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