What I'm looking at here is a conflict with...1920s-era technology. The Lincoln would be the equivalent of the USS Langley OTL.
She'd be called
Morey, not
Lincoln, to begin with.

And if Japan's beaten Russia, she's got oil in Sakhalin & ESiberia, so oil's less an issue. If you accept other sources, she can get palm, nut, or other oil from CAm/SAm, & tell the U.S. to go screw; it was reliance on petroleum OTL that gave the U.S./Br/Du embargo its teeth.
That aside, Japan would face similar problems to OTL: the threat of interdiction of supplies by USN submarines

(which also use IC engines, don't forget...).
July 1st-4th, 1863- Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, with urging from Sherman, launches his final assault to capture the trenchlines defending Vicksburg. Included in the assault are twenty 'Trenchers', large armoured vehicles with a breechloading cannon fore and aft.
Bit early for breechloaders... And why 2? If it's used for assault, 1 is enough. (Think of OTL Red Army assault guns.) I'd also wonder why ACS didn't have something like them, why there were no armored car duels (ACW =Kursk at, say, Brandy Station?), & why ACS trenches weren't too wide to be crossed by these monsters....
I had a thought, too, about tactical deployment. Given lo reliability & short range, it might be they have to operate close to railhead/rail spur, from special trains that carry their support teams, tools, & supplies. (It's an idea the Germans OTL used for aviation units, which is one reason they had such amazing tactical flexibility & responsiveness, despite being outnumbered.) And U.S.Army was very good at using railways.
Some corrections:
I guess I got carried away with calling the combined armoured units 'corps'. I'm assuming that they would be counted as a seperate unit, like artillery and infantry, so you would divide them differently.
And if the manpower that made up an armoured company was so different from an infantry or artillery company, the designations might get garbled on the way as well.
Force breakdowns (tentative):
Troop: 2 Trenchers and their accompanying logistical needs.
2 Troops equal...
Company: 4 Trenchers, 200 men, horses and wagons.
4 Armoured Companies equal...
Regiment: 16 Trenchers, 1200 men, horses and wagons. Mobile shops are controlled from battalion level.
4 Armoured Regiments equal...
Brigade: 64 Trenchers, 4500 men, horses and wagons. Larger, semi-permanent repair shops are controlled from this level.
I think your TOE may have a weakness: command/control. How are they being co-ordinated in the field? Semaphore? Heliograph? That seems to demand a 5h vehicle at 2-troop level (as Red Army tank units OTL), so your company would be 5 trenchers & 250 men, regiment 20 & 1500, & brigade 80 & about 5600. (I'd also wonder just how many horses this formation needs... I'd bet the numbers are pretty substantial. That would call for fairly enormous amounts of fodder, which also suggests keeping them close to supply rail lines.)
Another thought: how about the Union using crude incendiary weapons? I'm thinking a mortar that could lob a hollow iron ball filled partially with about 98% sulfuric acid, a/k/a oil of vitriol. Upon impact, drops of acid spray in all directions--and the heat released when absorbing water out of wood, cloth, etc., (technically known as the heat of solution with respect to the acid) is enough to ignite that same substance. (I don't believe white phosphorus could be had in sufficiently large quantities in the US at the time.)
I'd say that's a pretty good idea for a
Confederate anti-trencher weapon.

Especially if coupled with a variety of direct-fire rocket; making field guns is harder, CSA industry was strapped as it was OTL, & mortars were too damn inaccurate & too sophisticated for the era metallurgy (believe it, or not).
Next: armored cars for scouting? No. Why not? For effective scouting, you need stealth and speed. The latter you might get if the roads are in half-decent shape (a bit of a crapshoot); the former, not a snowball's chance in hell. The hiss of steam and the clank of the monkey motion would give away a position in no time flat. And not a chance you could silence a 19th century steam engine (and practical steam turbines--a lot quieter--were still over the horizon). But as command vehicles? Now you got something: picture Grant or Sherman directing a battle, able to move from one point to another. Might result in, say, Cold Harbor becoming a Union victory.
You're wrong there, I'm afraid. WW1/2, armored cars were routinely used for scouting. They didn't need to stay hidden, just keep
the enemy from moving in secret. Think of Gettysburg: a screen of armored cars meeting, exchanging fire, falling back to report, "We've met the enemy, General." I picture something like a WW1 Rolls armored car with a 9-barrel (3x3 [1 row firing while loaders refill the other 2]) .58 (same cal as the OTL AUS-issue Springfield infantry rifle) organ gun, just enough to scare off infantry with short-range anti-armor pyrockets (the new 4"-warhead model [think
Panzerfaust] will kill a trencher at 100yd, & the old 2" ones [think Bazooka] can kill an armored car at over 60...

Thank the Lord they haven't got many of those gas rockets; wearing a filter mask all the time gives me migranes.

)
Using 'em as command vehicles makes sense, too, especially for cav commanders who need to keep up with fluid action. I can even picture Stuart getting captured,


like O'Connor did.

And, thinking of submarines, CSN had 'em. Couldn't they break the blockade? Or, conversely, couldn't USN cruisers interdict CSN supply convoys...? Either way, IMO, you'd see airship ocean patrols...
after the development of rudimentary refining of crude oil (which was shipped in barrels in wagons and on rail cars), it still took about 30 years for gasoline to be recognized as a usable fuel rather than a nuisance byproduct.
IMO, you've overlooked the fact OTL there was small, or no, demand for liquid fuels, either. Certainly nothing like an auto industry or military which needed supplies of easy-to-use, easy-to-deliver liquid fuel. TTL, given the engine exists, IMO there'd be widespread trials with a variety of fuels. Don't forget, OTL there were even early experiments with gunpowder as fuel.

(I am not making that up, & no, I didn't see it here.

) As I noted in the Pistonpunk thread, IMO you'd get nut, palm, & other oils from a variety of places, & research into methanol would be followed by industrial methods. Where demand exists, solutions are found...
Also, let me suggest 2 other things: dirigibles, which can readily use heavier engines, & simpler engines. If the idea of IC is around (even gunpowder engines

), what about somebody getting a brainwave & inventing a
pulsejet? OK, it vibrates like a gigantic jackhammer,

but isolating it by spring-mounting it couldn't be
too big a jump...
First, airships would probably be impossible as well. The problem would be the lifting gas; I don't think that it was possible to isolate sufficient quantities of helium in the early-to-mid 1800s, and I suspect that hydrogen-related disasters would lead to a sudden halt in airship development.
I would disagree. A lot of our modern OTL reaction to hydrogen in airships is a product of a) radio & b) film from the
Hindenberg accident. Before that, there were lots of aircraft & airliner wrecks, & before that, hundreds of liner shipwrecks (of which
Titanic is only the best known, by
no means the only). People didn't say, "Stop with the flying!" or "Stop with the ocean liners!" Nor, IMO, would they TTL, absent radio & film.
Second, would this engine have applications in the construction industry as well as for the factories? If it could produce sufficient power for winches, cranes, elevators, and other such stationary paraphenalia, the nature of urban development might be changed.
Absolutely right: cranes, elevators, fire trucks (did somebody say Atlanta? Chicago? San Francisco? Toronto? Damn near every major city in NAm in the 19hC at one time or another?

Yep...

), buses... Could be buses mean subways & trolleys never develop. L.A.'d have gridlock a century sooner,


Manhattan would have probably 3 cross-town freeways (planned OTL but never completed), & suburbs would spring up everywhere...
The manufacturing capability to build many engines simply isn't there. Fordism isn't going to be invented for another century, and without mass production techniques, these engines are going to be massively expensive, thanks to the complicated machining required.
IMO, the capability would be developed if a market was perceived. OTL 1850, the U.S. alone built upwards of 1 million wagons (IIRC; it could've been over 3M), & around 1850 (IIRC), about 100K bicycles/yr. All it takes is some sharp businessman to think a powered wagon can take a piece of that. When they started, HBC & VOC had only a doz or couple of doz investors. Ford only had 3-4 backers, some OTL carmakers had only one (like a department store), & a lot of early OTL carmakers were capitalized at startlingly lo$ (to my modern eyes, anyhow

). Also, don't forget, this was an age when newness was in vogue, & when machines, like the cotton gin (for instance) were showing new ways of doing things. A willingness to try an apparently crazy scheme might be higher than you'd think.
I'll agree with your rough timeline of development, tho: ships, rail (more efficient, rather than more powerful, IMO, OTL's diesel advantage; might see streamliners, to take advantage of compactness, like OTL), & farm equipment (tractors, reapers, SP combines, & such).
On a darker note, suppose Morey and/or heirs can't get capital on this side of the Atlantic...
I think it's probable he would. The U.S. has historically been short of labor & subsituted machinery; this would be one more way of doing it. (How many horse teams can one IC wagon replace? And how much faster is a transatlantic crossing on IC than sail?)
Thought I'd bump this one. Does anyone have a problem with 1883 as the first flight date? I'm also wondering about...
...April 17, 1935. Thank god for the British, and the brave astronauts of the RAF...the Royal Aeronautical Force. Someone needs to go into space, right?
IMO, 1883 is way late for LTA. And 1935 maybe too early for space; materials tech has to be mightily advanced to withstand the heat at Mach 25...

not to mention re-entry.

I'm having a bit of trouble swallowing manned space flight by the '30s, though. That's an entirely different line of research/endeavor that had nothing to do with conventional internal combustion power. By then, Goddard was doing some key research, as were the Germans, but I don't see much changing here. To make manned space flight practical, you require high energy liquid fuels and oxidants-e.g., liquid oxygen-and liquefying atmospheric gases was still very rudimentary until the late '40s/early '50s, mostly due to still-developing refrigeration technology and understanding of thermodynamics.
Would you reject kerosene/alcohol & nitric acid, assuming something in the vein of the X-1/X-15? Launch from under a high-flying dirigible, boom & zoom, hit 100km, deadstick back? (Can I nominate William G. Barker as 1st man in space?

)
I keep coming back to chemical weapons of a different sort, though. Hand grenades weren't really used until World War I--but could the glass industry (largely a northern endeavor, much of which was located in southern New Jersey) provide frangible glass bottles that could contain, say, acid--or ammonia water and a solution of sodium hypochlorite (a/k/a Clorox), which could yield up chlorine gas (shades of Ypres, 1915)?
I like that a lot.


Your idea of an internal "smokescreen", too.
When the Confederate machine passes over this device, the underside of the boiler and firebox will radiate ungodly amounts of heat
Hang on!
It's not steam-powered!

It's an
IC engine! (Good thinking on developing land mines, tho.

)
At the same time American paratroops will drop on Cuba to aid the rebels. So...it's 1898. What kind of aircraft would the American AAS (American Air Service) be using?
I can picture your troop carrier looking a bit like
this & fighters like
this. (If that looks too advanced, recall the Wright brothers used the bipe arrangement because they needed stiffness & because they hadn't conceived ailerons; TTL, I can imagine somebody would (as Bleriot did; WP claims "English inventor M.P.W. Bolton patented the first aileron-type device for lateral control" in 1868).
(see what happens when an engineer gets involved here? He knows too damn much technological history for his own good.

)
Curses! Foiled again!

Go away!

