Well, Johnny, I'll try to summarize this then.
First of all you obviously need a machine. Get the best you can afford - I didn't and it caused a lot of frustration. (and a few hours in the workshop)
Many consider Ultra Tec and Facetron as excellent, to give you a few pointers. I haven't tried them.
In addition to the machine you need a loupe, 10x triplet corrected and achromatic. Or in other words, don't get some chinese crap.
Bausch and Lomb, Gemoro are a few good loupes. The chinese (OFTEN) have poor depth of focus - meaning a lot tends to be blurry.
Below is what a loupe looks like.
You need dopsticks, the rocks you cut are attached to these during cutting. What dopsticks you get depends on the machine.
Sometimes there is a bunch included. Dopsticks from my machine:
Then of course you need laps. Laps is what do the cutting, basically they replace large scratched with substantially smaller ones until you can't see them anymore. (there's more to this - but just a quickie here)
When looking for laps you need to know if you can use 6" or 8" laps on your machine.
You need 3-4 laps.
360 for roughly grinding the rock into shape. (often used for "pre-forming")
600 for main cutting, everything is now moved close to where it should be)
1200 or 3000 for pre-polish
Then you need one or two polishing laps.
Google for Gearloose or batt lap, I use almost exclusively his laps myself. You can get advice from him to.
Here are a few laps:
The last and often most challenging thing is to find good rough, like those below:
I hope that gives you an overview!
What exactly you need in the end depends on what you get with the machine. Sometimes a few laps are also included.
