The thing that really gets me is just how densely the whole mechanism is packed together. What a masterpiece. The techniques must have been developed incrementally over many revisions of the machine, perhaps over several lifetimes by various machinists and/or designers.

Sadly I read somewhere that the "slop" between the gears (the mechanical imperfections that add or multiply together over many gears) would overwhelm the more complex calculations that some of the machine was intended to perform.