Hello everyone
After seeing recently some puzzles that contain gears I was wondering what else ideas could be combined with them. And I think I found a way to make geared version of crazy planets. Since the puzzle would require spherical gears and because of that an experienced designer I'm posting general idea here.
In case of other geared puzzle turning one of faces (or corners) forces another to turn. As for crazy planets my initial idea was to make circles rotate while rotating one of faces. But there was one problem, when for example making F turn only circle on B would rotate and other faces would be blocked. So as solution I put circles on cross cube, that way when rotating one face all of remaining faces could also be rotated.
Here's render of puzzle.
Mechanism which I found looks like this:
There are gears attached to the core (let's assume those spherical pieces are gears) and this is inner shell of mechanism, another one are standard 3x3 pieces made in a way that when rotating they don't affect gears.
Central pieces on cross cube layers are attached to gears and there are 2 kinds of them: one working like in crazy/circle cube and one working like normal 3x3 layer.
When rotating the first kind nothing special happens, but in second case said face triggers gears which results in circles moving in all other faces. Additionally when one of those affected faces has second kind of center it will move as well.
There's limitation however. Two faces with second kind of central piece couldn't share an edge because it would lock up whole puzzle. This leaves us with only version of puzzle (with one face of second kind or two on opposite faces of the puzzle). But the number of members in this family could be easily made bigger by introducing different gear ratios to different faces
What do you think of this idea?
Krystian
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