ok i know this is all apsurd but the fact is they actually build super heawy tanks, practically ewery nation in europe ider had them on paper or really had char c size tanks in their armoured units, and the reasons for them were alwais equally apsurd
apparently warious politicians and generals, mainly without much experience with such matters, and where would they get experience with tanks, they were olnly around for a couple of decades, had this idea of moving fortresses and huge landships with enough firepower to level a small hill
you can kind of understand them, what with the sort of tactics used in WWI and the general mental owerreliance on massive war tehnology in many western cultures of the day
the factors that might favor super heawy tank production are mostly psihological, the publick saw them as superweapons bound to win battles and wars, the sheer size of them gave a sense of invincibility, so supertanks could be(and were) used as a propaganda tool, and as such become important political matters
also it would be logical to expect the warious companies working for any military industry to pull all strings possible to assure the bigest contracts they can get, including huge ewen inpractical ones such as the supertank
and then theres the impact on enemy moral, seeing huge metal monsters rolling ower the battlefield, ewen if after a few battles they prowe to be largely useles, the first time any soldier would see such a thing on the enemy side the olnly idea he would no doubt have is to run the hell away from it, possibly prompting each side to include huge war machines in their armies simply out of moral isues
and if they can get a 13 000 tons excavator machine to work and move on caterpilar tracks, granted its a completely different desing and concept, but still, these thigs were built in the 70is i think, and the tehnology to build them must of been around in the 1950/60 for sure, so in 1930 is it so inprobbable, as apsurd as we today might think it, that a 70/100 ton machine is built on a larger scale, especially if by some pod in the WWI timeline the ilusion of invincibility of huge tanks is created in the minds of politicians and military comand, and if something butterflies the start of WWII a few years into the 1940is.
id asume a fashist france could do somthing to help such a timeline, as the arms race between germany and france could pospone the war somewhat before ider side decides its strong enough for a remach, and the WWI trauma might make the french invest more into char c and other fcm prototipes, given military comanders suporting more logical desings, such as Estienne, get pushed out of political favor somehow
and what if one side hears the others are building a bigger tank with armour that none of theyr guns can penetrate and a gun calibre they cant mach
no doubt they order the development of an ewen bigger tank with thicker armour and a antitank gun bigger than the other side has
and then the other side hears of this project and does the same
and back and forth untill they start building landcruiser size machines for real