Stone Knives and Bearskins

Well, I didn't intend to put more thought into Re-Inventing the Wheel for some time, but after the comment to it, I did more pondering in between other thoughts, and my brain handed me the results on a platter just to the side of my breakfast today. It was a bit confusing, as I wasn't sure if I was meant to have such a crunchy side dish, and after cracking a couple of teeth on it while blindly munching on it all, I took a good look and realized it wasn't actually an extra few strips of bacon, after all.

Once I was examining it outside the context of hunger, I realized it is much more difficult to do than I thought it might be, but it is also likely to be a more ultimate solution to the problem at some future point. I had not really had the concept of planetary gears firmly in mind yet, either, because if I had, I would have realized I could not transfer power the way I was thinking, but would instead need to separately and simultaneously rotate the planetary gears, against the fixed center gear, in order to cause the outer rim gear to actually rotate as desired.

As soon as I had that thought, I realized I was again misconceptualizing it, and that I would need to just build the darn thing as a physical model from scrap paper or something to do thought experiments, and that I simply didn't know enough about planetary gears and such to do this yet. So this whole idea is definitely shelved until I get much farther down the developmental road.

So to speak. Ahem.