[usrusr]

PS: what was up with my mind when I wrote this? (second paragraph) Some serious confusion about throughput and power: power and mass throughput are obviously the same at a given shaft height, the advantage of a chain with less gaps/more vessels in transit at the same time is that you don't need much speed to achieve throughput.

Still, the approach of stacking many copies of the same loop design, with a well designed handover mechanism remains the way to go, instead of one big elevator trying to achieve throughput by faster travel. The key core idea is that the structure that carries the upper parts of the whole thing is already there (all the ground that hasn't been dug into)