The turntable was put together when I was building the tonearms, being a physicist I don't go too deep down the rabbit hole of high end audio, but if there are actual principles involved, then there is work to be done. Basically, the Kenwood KD-500 spins records at a constant speed, has a flat area and room to place the tonearm, and doesn't generate it's own noise. Acoustic feedback into the structure of the turntable base is a real phenomenon, so i did what I could to minimize this, add mass and lower the Q of the base. The Kenwood is made of a cast resin composite material that is a very good start to this. I took the bottom off and found that the cavities in between the ribbed structure of the casting could be packed with pieces of 1/8 inch thick sheet lead and a material called duxseal, a sticky, non-hardening putty like stuff originally developed for sealing air conditioning ducts. It has been used for acoustic damping of audio gear for years. Layers of lead and duxseal fill the cavities and then I put the bottom back on. It's quite heavy, and does not ring when tapped.
The tonearm was invented to allow the two degrees of freedom that one wants, frictionless linear motion and a rotary motion about the axis of the air bearing tube. The design of the carrier is such that it is passively self-aligning, something I consider an advance over the Rabinow arm of the time. Mechanical bearings cannot be made with low enough friction so that the stylus can provide the only motive force. Making it non-jamming was accomplished by removing the parts of the half-cylinder that jam, another basic principle in physics. There is a row of tiny holes in the top of the air bearing tube that support the mass of the tonearm. Vertical tracking angle was a hot topic of conversation at the time, and I was curious, so I made it adjustable while in use. Very few people could find the same VTA just by listening, of any. There is no need for the carrier to go all the way around the air bearing tube unless you want to use it in a zero G environment. Switching cartridges for A-B testing takes ten seconds or so with a few pre-configured arms ready to go. The only contact point on the tonearm is the stylus, I think this is a good principle.
Here is a picture of some of the parts for the telescope