Looks like I'm not the only one who just became the owner of a Star
lathe.

Can't help with the drive system, but have some comments on the taper.
The lathes.co.uk site doesn't seem to mention the taper so I did a
little measuring of my own last night.

The tailstock taper on my 9" Star is a standard Morse #2 taper. The
headstock taper is a different story... it isn't a Morse, Jarno, or
Browne and Sharp taper.

The taper is somewhere around 0.035 and 0.034. Best I could do using
telescoping hole gages and a caliper to measure depth and diameter. The
raw numbers look something like this: 1.000 major 0.917 minor 2.416
length. Those were quick measurements the other night trying to see if
it matched any of the standard tapers so take those numbers as rough.

The previous owner made a sleeve adapter to use standard MT2 centers in
the headstock. Others in this newsgroup have done the same.