If they're intended to go into firing range, I'd expect they'd want at least a bit of light armour to defend against small arms fire.
Based on the accounts I've read from the Boer War, I'd say that magazine rifles were a bigger factor than artillery. Artillery was the big killer of WW1, true...
A light tankette-style vehicle should be doable: basically a two-man, car-sized tank, with one person driving it and the other firing the gun. Its smaller size would make it easier to build and engineer than a "proper" tank, and it would have obvious use in an infantry support role, making it a...
TBH I think the focus on trench warfare might be a red herring. Military thinkers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were well aware of the difficulties new weapons posed for infantry, as illustrated in (for example) the Franco-Prussian and Boer Wars. Getting your soldiers through the...
I think the underlying cause is probably that the French (and more generally European) intelligentsia had mostly embraced various brands of deism or atheism by this point. After all, suppression of heretics and Church-state association had been an off-and-on factor for over a thousand years, and...
Even if he was already Emperor of the French, he might well reason that two empires are better than one. Plus there extra legitimacy in Germany would always be helpful.
Though given Napoleon's personality, I imagine he'd still end up fighting too many people and being forced into exile. No...
Something like that did actually (almost) happen with Elizabeth I of England; to quote Wikipedia:
It was not obvious which bishop should conduct the coronation service. That role traditionally fell to the archbishop of Canterbury, but the incumbent Reginald Pole had died of influenza on 17...
Would an Austrian-ruled Netherlands still rebel like IOTL? And if it did, would the Austrians be more or less likely to defeat the rebellion than their Spanish bretheren?
I don't think that would work either -- no-one else would have any reason to accept either the deposition or the antipope as legitimate.
The best option, I think, would be to imprison Innocent IV and try and pressure him into a more pro-Imperial stance. If this is successful, great; if not...
Well, firstly, the 19th century was the period when social darwinist ideas reached their peak. Great powers were expected to be continually expanding, and anybody who didn't risked being left behind and eventually crushed by their more expansionist rivals, so I don't think it's really in keeping...
My point was that other countries were capable of settling vast tracts of land. Canada has a lower population because its climate is less hospitable, not because the US had some special colonisation power that everyone else lacked. If the British occupy land in OTL's Midwest and West, there's no...
Given all this, what would have happened if the French Crown had simply declared bankruptcy and announced it wasn't going to pay its existing debts, a la Philip II of Spain? Obviously it would have been a blow to the Crown's prestige, but would it have been a temporary embarrassment that the...
Where did the millions of migrants willing to work the soil in Canada from? Though even if the Great Plains don't get settled, I think the Allies could survive, because they've got essentially the whole world to import food from.
Louisiana would either remain part of the Spanish Empire, be given back to France again, or conquered sometime by Britain (probably during the Napoleonic Wars). If it remains part of the Spanish Empire, it would most likely gain independence along with the rest of the New World, and the Allies...
A dis-united America wouldn't be as powerful as OTL's USA, but its aggregate resources might well be similar, or even greater (since small states are often more efficient and better governed). With a POD in the 1770s or '80s, it's perfectly plausible -- likely, even -- that, for example, Texas'...