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Q&A

How slowly would continental gears need to turn to not destroy everything?

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Out there in the vastness of space there is a colossal machine by unknown makers. An entire artificial planet that, underneath the initial crust, has massive systems of clockwork with the topmost pieces being continent-size gears that are slowly ticking.

By ticking, I mean that over the course of some amount of time, they will slowly start turning, turn for a while, then stop again.

What I want to know is, how fast could this rotation possibly be without destroying a modern city or even a city similar to Rome at the height of the Roman Empire with the city located at the edge of the gear?

Additional Information:

  • The planet is approximately the size of Earth.
  • The continental gears are around the size of Europe or, about 4 million miles squared.
  • The gears are made of a material that acts similarly to steel except strong enough to endure the massive scales of all this.
  • The gears are not directly exposed, they are beneath a large layer of rock and soil that acts as a crust.
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This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/61351. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

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