so because of how vintage story deals with combining mechanical power input, if you have two or more windmills you can cheat thermodynamics and acquire a huge speed without loosing much torque

have one windmill go through a 1:N reduction (didn't test how far i can push this, but 1:25 worked, aka, 2 large-gears worth of reduction) (after thinking for two seconds, duh, you can push this as far as your inputs can still drive the large gears, but it also mean you could split the input (or have more inputs), then periodically add more torque later on the chain, rather than all at the start)

then feed that into another large gear, and connect your other windmills to it as well

when combining multiple inputs in a single large gear, the game sums up the torque of all inputs, but uses the speed of the fastest input

so by having one windmill with 1:N where N is really high, it'll have almost no torque, but add one or two 1:1 windmills to a large gear with it, and now the large gear has 1-or-2 100kN of torque, while running at a 1:N gear reduction, aka, super fast

i kinda hope they'll patch this exploit with the upcoming rework of mechanical energy, but until they do, i'll be using it to run every machine at 25x speed heh