The Cardan grille approach to the Voynich MS taken to the next level

[julian]

How the wheels would actually be used is is something that interests me, both in terms of dealing with null wheels / spaces and possibilities of creating something beyond simply a vocabulary.

Do the rarer VMS words with more than one gallows mean that the wheels were traversed more than once?

The thing that has caught my imagination is the way the wheels can be used to make the same Voynichese word using different wheel combinations (see Julian's blog post You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) - thus possibly encoding completely different plaintext words.  It is so weird it just could be the explanation for the unusual whole word serial repetition, yet the seeming lack of repetition of other, longer whole word patterns seen in Voynichese.  Could the authors have been so caught up in their "system" that they didn't realize it how difficult this would be for reversing the cipher? 

I guess the million dollar question is how can we figure out now which wheels represent what plaintext letters?  Sorry to state the obvious but I'm really not sure what the next step would be.  Any ideas?

Nothing is obvious in this Voynich game :-) The authors probably thought their system was obvious, as they twisted their cipher wheels, and look where we are ...

One train of thought about wheels (or tables, or whatever they might be) is that *if* there are nine wheels being used, and *if* each wheel has a 50% chance of being used, then all we need to do is look at all the long VMS words to find out which glyphs are on each wheel. Because if a VMS word has length nine, we know that all the wheels were used. So if we look at all VMS words of length nine, we should be able to assemble the set of glyphs which were on each wheel.

But this must be too simple.