Gearing Problems

Not much progress made last night.  I started looking at gearing ratios for the various planets and moons to "downgear" from one planet to the next.  For example, when I look at Jupiter and its four moons, if I start by using Callisto's orbit as the drive gear (rotating once every 16.689 days), I can successively downgear from that for Ganymede, Io, Europa and Jupiter's rotation (the fastest at 0.414 days), in order.

After thinking about gearing though, I started thinking about moon inclination from Jupiter's equator, and how to represent that, and also the axial tilt of Jupiter itself.  Trying to model this in 3DS Max turned out to be a bust, as I cant figure out how to turn gears at angles that are not 90 or 180 degrees.  Maybe I'll make some progress on this later this weekend.

I think likely all moons in my orrery will be modeled with circular orbits due to their extremely low eccentricities.  Also, I plan to not model the rotation of the moons themselves.  That should make for less weight on the end of the arms from gearing mechanisms.