Well since I have been reading a lot of n00b questions tonight. I thought I would add my own. This is something I have always wanted to know. Going back to Gran Turismo. What do the tranny gear numbers mean?? What is the affect of changing them?? I got all night, I am ready to LEARN!!!!

 

this is a good starting point

http://science.howstuffworks.com/gear-ratio.htm

 

And you thought Texan got you with the last one.....




Check out http://www.howstuffworks.com under the engine area, to really learn with some visual elements (totally made the rotary engine make sense for me! ).


The different gears corralate the spectrum each gear will cover. the numbers all have to do with how many revolutions of say the engine will occur for every revolution of the wheel (simplified). Then you have the final drive gear that shifts the entire transmission up and down, because it is the final gear that the first 1 - 5 must go through. Its like in algebra where you have a parabola graph...you know y=mx+b. so you could say speed=gearing+final drive. Well with the parabola graph, the m part dictates how broad or narrow the parabola is and the b part tells it how low or high to start on the y axis. So say you raised your final drive to the popular 4.928 gear. Now whenever you switched gears it would still drop the normal 1000 rpms or whatever, just everything would 500 rpms higher. So of instead of cruising at 3500 you would be 4000, but whenyou go up a gear it would still fall 1000 rpms.

Ask questions if you got them.

 

bastard, you beat me!

 

and that brings us to effective torque output and torque multiplication through gearing, but perhaps that's best left for later in the discussion. We just recently discussed some of this, but damn does this board get rid of threads quickly.