> Bis repetita placent, as they say...

As Claude said, good solid thinking there. :)

As far as KISS goes, I think that in relation to the 8 numbers per dial, one of two things is true.

1. All the numbers on one dial are utilized to come up with one number, which then can be mapped to a letter as seen above.
2. Only one number is used from each dial, and the rest are superfluous. In order for this to work, there has to be some kind of "path" through the dials (i.e: 1st dial-12:00, 2nd dial-3:00, 3rd dial-6:00, etc.) I've come up with a few paths based on the numbers that are shared between two or three dials here, but I'm sure there are more, and if you mod-26 all the numbers down to letter pairings, there would be even more possibilities! :)

I'm wondering if the fact that there are two zeroes is an indicator that we should start counting at 0 (a=0, b=1, c=2, etc.). Then again, maybe you're correct and any number outside the 1-26 range should be eliminated. Maybe a decent pattern would come out of that...

I think also that the ROT method could easily come into play again with these solutions. Possibly one number on a dial is the encoded letter, and one indicates the ROT number (and one indicates which language it's in, and one indicates the number system, and one indicates the planetary alignment, and aaaaaaahhhhhh!!!). :)

Also, if all of this is (close to being) true, then there have to be two paths, one for each of the two words. Or, maybe one path that returns 14 letters, kind of like the different ways that the alphabet in G1 could have been inserted into the tic-tac-toe grid.

Must... organize... thoughts...