I take it that the turbocharged horses with jet boosters aren't "historical"? No normal horse should run at 75 Miles Per Hour, and I don't believe that the equine turbocharger had been invented yet in that era.
While the encumbrance values are a good idea in theory, their balance in the game is somewhere between way off and broken. As a starting character, I've got a thin shirt/pants, a lightweight pair of boots, and a fairly light one-handed weapon. Wearing either a cloth cap or pair of leather gloves raises my encumbrance to where I've got 30+ point penalties to most of my skills. That's absurd, especially for skills that are only 50 or so to start with.
Most of my character's starting Attribute stats are in the "early-to-mid-game" range for vanilla M&B (around 9-15), except for one which started out about 30 points higher. The game seems to inflict a lot of "all or nothing" choices on you, making the character totally inept due to massive penalties at just about everything, but potentially with god-like abilities in one specific area, depending on your choices.
Like most mods that attempt to be "moar uber", by making EVERYTHING "over the top" right from the start, it ends up that nothing is, and then there's no room for expansion from there. The excessive stats and requirements on many items means that you can't do much of anything until you qualify to use them, and then your character abruptly goes from a target dummy for the first few levels to a near-indestructible wrecking machine within only a couple of additional levels. Once you achieve that, it's all just "more of the same" for the rest of the game.
In essence, several very good ideas in the mod, but BAD implementations of a lot of it.