I haven’t mapped it to a satellite model myself, but the ratios in the Antikythera are astonishingly close to those we use for small attitude adjustments. The Greeks were already using compound gear trains to reduce a 1:360 solar day into a 1:12 lunar month, which is the same basic principle we exploit with reaction wheels. If you overlay the ancient mechanism onto a modern attitude‑control diagram, you’ll see the same nested ratios, just expressed in bronze teeth instead of silicon chips. The real challenge is that the ancient designers had to account for mechanical play and backlash, whereas today we use precision bearings and active control loops. Still, the core idea—using a series of gears to break down a large angular motion into a smaller, more manageable one—remains unchanged. If you want a precise comparison, I can pull up the exact tooth counts and compare them to the 2.5 mm reaction wheel increments used on the ISS.

I’ve got the numbers handy. The bronze gears on the Antikythera had tooth counts in the 30‑to‑50 range, giving a precision of about a few millimeters over the entire train. Not quite the nanometer accuracy of ISS reaction wheels, but it’s impressive for a 1st‑century device. If we reverse‑engineered that into a modern control loop, the Greeks would probably need a few extra gears to match today’s fine‑tuning. Still, it shows how far the basic gear‑train concept has stood the test of time.