You don't have to summon the worms of Dune, but you need to have a reason why staying in one place does not work. This opens up the economic case to build everything mobile: quarters, industry, garages, hospitals, refineries, even warehouses.Your already established reasons against flying will prevent airships popping up as solutions, going orbital is discouraged by the necessity to return to ground for replenishing handwavium stores and the associated risk in crossing the atmosphere.

So the only viable path is going mobile, and the only way to conserve energy is going mobile in as few vehicles as possible. the energetic overhead of airconditioning (make the desert cold, not hot, otherwise that relation will be reversed. poisonous atmosphere is a bonus), radiation-proofing, and generally xyz-ing everything that favours mass over surface will automaticall lead to huge crawlers. Now if you absolutely HAVE to have military conflict on a scale that includes attacks that could endanger whole vehicles structurally (instead of just limited raiding, or boarding-attemps), you'll have to go the way of the carrier group: huge vehicles with rather small scale weaponry and some incredibly costly cargo (be it industry or attack-craft) accompanied by smaller, faster, energetically more costly vehicles with more punch. Everyone will just engage in short range attacks and mine-laying because your aerial interdiction (winds? aliens with plane-allergies?) may be extended to make artillery shelling unreliable (bad aerial reconnaissance-possiblities already go a long way to making artillery short range).

A word on numbers: Mass goes by the cube of size, while the area (both atmospheric surface and touched surface) goes by the square of size. Ground pressure on a tank can average up to around 100kPa for the heavier ones, which is easy to remember, because that is one atmosphere of pressure. If you want to keep your lawn, you should not exceed 10kPa, if you just want the ground to bear you, everything from 100kPa (loose sand) to 800kPa (dense clay-y gravel) may apply. So in a sandy desert, we should not much exceed the current heavyweight tanks? I' not convinced - for very large surfaces, the admissible ground-pressure may well be much higher, because the material simply has nowhere to go - The Schwerbelastungskörper was a Nazi test of how much the ground would actually bear: They weighed down 100m² with 12kt of concrete (so 1200kPa)- not much sinking was observed. You might need speial treads to actually achieve full coverage aof huge areas, but why not go with pressurized mats or some other area-spreading technique? Clunky steel treads don't fare well with sharp edges of unyielding material.

Bucket wheel excavators Weigh in the 10kt range and have a motor in the 15MW range (Abrams: 0.06kt, 1MW, so talk about scaling...) - they also have extensive booms and overhang, so the actual tread-to-mass-ratio is probably much smaller than in tanks. Sure, to generate 1MW you need about 100grams of fuel per second, but that weird landcrawlers haunting alien deserts would need some kind of handwavium was clear from the get-go, i think.

I say take a good look at bucket excavators, scale, armor (if you absolutely can't stop yourself) and let 'em rip!

If driving is all you can, driving is what you'll do. You don't have to summon the worms of Dune, but you need to have a reason why staying in one place does not work (Weird alien proscriptions? Some legal loophole ('No permanent structure shall...')? Something geological (the terminator of a very slow-revolving planet makes the local lanscape go boom)? Something celestial (Pityful atmo (perhaps mostly sand in VVLEO?), no magnetic field, and some harsh irradiators in the vicinity that burn everything they face)?). This builds the economic case to design everything mobile: quarters, industry, garages, hospitals, refineries, even warehouses.Your already established reasons against flying will prevent airships popping up as solutions, going orbital is discouraged by the necessity to return to ground for replenishing handwavium stores and the associated risk in crossing the atmosphere.

So the only viable path is going mobile, and the only way to conserve energy is going mobile in as few vehicles as possible. the energetic overhead of airconditioning (make the desert cold, not hot, otherwise that relation will be reversed. Poisonous atmosphere is a bonus), radiation-proofing, and generally xyz-ing everything that favours mass over surface will automaticall lead to huge crawlers. Now if you absolutely HAVE to have military conflict on a scale that includes attacks that could endanger whole vehicles structurally (instead of just limited raiding, or boarding-attemps), you'll have to go the way of the carrier group: huge vehicles with rather small scale weaponry and some incredibly costly cargo (be it industry or attack-craft) accompanied by smaller, faster, energetically more costly vehicles with more punch. Everyone will just engage in short range attacks and mine-laying because your aerial interdiction (winds? aliens with plane-allergies?) may be extended to make artillery shelling unreliable (bad aerial reconnaissance-possiblities already go a long way to making artillery short range).

A word on numbers: Mass goes by the cube of size, while the area (both atmospheric surface and touched surface) goes by the square of size. Ground pressure on a tank can average up to around 100kPa for the heavier ones, which is easy to remember, because that is one atmosphere of pressure. If you want to keep your lawn, you should not exceed 10kPa, if you just want the ground to bear you, everything from 100kPa (loose sand) to 800kPa (dense clay-y gravel) may apply. So in a sandy desert, we should not much exceed the current heavyweight tanks? I'm not convinced - for very large surfaces, the admissible ground-pressure may well be much higher, because the material simply has nowhere to go - The Schwerbelastungskörper was a Nazi test of how much the ground would actually bear: They weighed down 100m² with 12kt of concrete (so 1200kPa)- not much sinking was observed. You might need speial treads to actually achieve full coverage of huge areas, but why not go with pressurized mats or some other area-spreading technique? Clunky steel treads don't fare well with sharp edges of unyielding material.

Bucket wheel excavators weigh in the 10kt range and have a motor in the 15MW range (Abrams: 0.06kt, 1MW, so talk about scaling...) - they also have extensive booms and overhang, so the actual tread-to-mass-ratio is probably much smaller than in tanks. Sure, to generate 1MW you need about 100grams of fuel per second, but that weird landcrawlers haunting alien deserts would need some kind of handwavium was clear from the get-go, i think.

I say take a good look at bucket excavators, scale up, armor (if you absolutely can't stop yourself) and let 'em rip!