[juancampa]

I was thinking the same but with chains or some heavy contiguous body. The problem is that you need something that can lift one super heavy load, as opposed to many lighter weight ones. I guess that's what you mean by hydraulics but then you need hydraulics

[pas]

Hundreds of small pumps and pistons would be easy and reliable though.

[juancampa]

Reliability of a system is the reliability of each component multiplied together. It gets exponentially less reliable as you add components