On the military developments front, Thande's Look to the West goes borderline steampunk, with several powers developing military towing tractors and self-propelled artillery guns already in the 19th century. With steam propulsion, of course. Nothing fancy or fast, but gives certain sides a technological edge before newer technology shows up.
On that note, back in the day I told Thande that I consider his use of steam vehicles in LTTW rather less than plausible that early they become commonplace in the TL. After the 1850s, or 1860s, though, I could definitely see lighter-than-OTL steam tractors and even primitive self-propelled guns to be adopted in some nations: in comparison to the OTL, that would have required the steam carriage effort of the 1830s to continue in Britain and in France, and spread to the German areas as well. IOTL, the good beginnings in Britain were essentially killed by a combination of too unrealistic expectations from the get-go and the railway industry (and the railway mania) taking up most of the resources and interest that could have been realistically invested into steam on the roads and streets (and eventually off-road as well). The development (and adoption, and combining) of the suitable materials, like strong and resilient enough steel for the chassis, drivetrain and engine parts, or rubber for the wheels, the miniaturisation of the high pressure steam engine (with necessary reduction in weight), creating working suspension and power transmission, etc, would have happened faster if there was a continuous research tradition since the early days, a tradition that in Britain was lost IOTL to a big degree in the 1840s. After that, in the absence of a continued, independent steam carriage/steam car tradition, to put it in simplified terms for several decades most steam vehicles on the road IOTL were small railway locomotives on artillery wheels.
At the end of the line, by the 1880s we could have had surprisingly functional and fast steam cars on the roads, adopted across Europe and America, and quite likely the adoption of internal combustion vehicles would have been lot more of an uphill struggle in the face of established steam motoring on the roads and highways. In fact I could see that in such a TL, for some time the internal combustion engine (the "explosion engine") could be seen as explicitly an aircraft power source, a niche innovation, until it starts gaining popularity as a car motor as well.
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