Do faired recumbents need more gear range? I am researching into faired recumbents, bicycles or trikes, such as the Velomobile Quest or the Sunrider.  I'm interested in cycling long distances as a daily commute and for touring, but have no interest in racing or mountain-biking.  My current, upright bicycle (Koga Miyata) has a Rohloff gear and on my trips, I use both the smallest and the largest gear regularly.  According to Rohloff, typical derailleurs do not have a higher gear range than the Rohloff Speedhub (which has 526%), although Wikipedia reports gear ranges up to 700% for derailleurs.

Faired recumbents can be really heavy (45 kg for the Sunrider) and really fast (2% downhill, 100W, 63.8 km/h, but also 30% faster than racers when flat).  Really fast means one wants to have a very high gear, but really heavy means one also wants a really small gear to make it up steep slopes.  Considering that I'm already using the full 526% range on my current upright bicycle, I wonder; do heavy, faired recumbents need more gear range than upright bicycles?  I love my Rohloff, but should one consider getting a higher gear range on a faired recumbent?
Short answer: yes, but a Rohloff works for me.

I've been riding a Rohloff-equipped RotoVelo on and off for a couple of years now. I did play with the gearing a little when I got it and it's pretty usable now. The RotoVelo weighs about 33kg and I live in a relatively flat city.

I have it set up so that spinning reasonably fast in bottom gear I'm doing about walking speed - say 3km/hr. That way I can go up overpasses and the sort of hills we get in Melbourne and Sydney with a bit of work. Set up that way I spin out at about 80kph. Frankly, at 80kph I've usually stopped pedaling and I'm just going "wheeeeee!". My top speed ever is over 100kph, which was a bit scary.

When I stop at a traffic light I shift all the way down then back up a couple. And I mean all the way down, typically at 30-40kph cruise speed I'm in gear 9 or higher, so it's much easier to just twist all the way than try to remember what gear I'm in. Which is an advantage of the Rohloff - all the gear intervals are the same so you can just keep shifting without worrying.

It's possible to combine a Rohloff with a front derailleur if you really need to. I suggest waiting until you have the velo before committing, but make sure you can if you need to - most velo makers normally ship deraillers, so getting them to leave the front derailleur post in place shouldn't be an issue. With your small rear wheel (most velos are 406/20") the low gear should be fine with the Rohloff 2.1x gearing requirement, it'll be a question of how big a chainring you can fit in.

For touring I'd be tempted to use lower ratios than for commuting. With heavy gear in the bike and more hills in the country I found that I was pushing the velo more often than I would prefer. Partly that's from the heat build - lack of ventilation becomes an issue when you have to work really hard to keep the vehicle moving at all up a hill. Not being able to pedal faster than (say) 60kph wouldn't bother me, but being able to sit back and grind slowly up long hills would be better than pushing.