Today I learned: Apparently, automatic transmissions are hydraulic computers. Or at least the ones up until recently; recent ones have more and more electronic control.
@Motodrachen If you don't mind explaining something I'm having trouble understanding, since this seems like your area of expertise: Something I've never understood is how exactly changing gears works in them. Everything I can see just says "it's just using planetary gears" in the same way you might say "it's just using magic"; I don't follow how planetary gears allow you to do anything regular gears don't, except perhaps having concentric input and output shafts.
re: The Gear Wars
@Motodrachen How do you change which gears are engaged to the shaft, though? What I'm getting from this is that you need to have one of the three gears connected to the input shaft, one to the output shaft, and one fixed in place, but how do you rearrange all that with so little room to work, without having far too many moving parts for any semblence of reliability?
re: The Gear Wars
@Motodrachen This is going over my heads again, I'm afraid.