Related (Steve Mould has been fascinated with the centripetal physics of the chain): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcqX4UMXNKEdNBKABT3ZF...

This is essentially a powered Mould effect in place of using gravity.

Doesn't even need to be an actual chain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_fountain

It's like you keep shooting ammo upward at it and it catches it and throws it down again, hard.

The chain robot subplot of Seveneves makes a lot more sense now :)

the chain link tech in Seveneves was wild.

as a nearly perfectly uninformed occasional consumer of space-related articles, I can say it makes a lot of sense (to me) why we'd use something like that to move things around the solar system.

I got my youngest a ZipString Aracna for Christmas (entirely driven by a tiny cameo in the film Weapons). It is rare that a toy for kids feels magical, but it's been a real hit over the holidays.

A related idea is to improve the efficiency of a trebuchet by stringing heavy weighted nodes along the sling line. The biggest one built so far used one 50 pound node on the sling line to launch an 8 pound pumpkin 1500 feet, but the math says it keeps working better as you add more nodes. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ruiMZYTc5HE