The unlocked nozzle angle has worked nicely, manely because there haven't been many needs to reset it.  The lion has managed to remember to manually fix the roll before resetting it.  The unlocked nozzle angle has also increased the encoder drift.  There is a plan for achieving higher precision & using quadrature encoders.

It's going to have 2 fat power wires & a single data wire connected to all 3 motors.  All 3 motors get the same circuit board, which has an H bridge & brain.  The lowest board is stationary, controls all 3 motors, has an LED, IR receiver.  It polls the motors with serial commands.  All the motors have quadrature encoders.  Either the polling has to be real fast, the boards have to buffer encoder ticks, or the motors have to be real slow.  It's believed this arrangement will free up enough wire so it can handle a full 360 deg rotation during a reset if the lion forgets to manually fix the roll.  

A simulated 300:1 gear ratio looked like an acceptable speed, but it may no longer be possible to turn it by paw.  It might need rotation without reset.  Besides the motors, it needs the H bridges & microcontrollers.  The reserve Atmega328's might do the job but are big.