On the topic of a spring powered climb, I am convinced that there is potential for a constant torque spring solution. Vuclan calls this a contorque motor. It can be seen at the bottom of
this page
I had toyed around with this idea for the 1768 climber. Given that the system was already driven by just a single motor, there was already a single shaft in existence that could be used for the contorque motor. The trouble was really that the system needed to both extend and retract, which meant that implementing this would have just meant extending would take longer.
Had we initially started designing with this in mind I think the idea would be to use pancake cylinders as brakes to hold the contorque motor locked until it was time to release it and climb. Another pancake cylinder could be used to hold the entire system down in the stowed position, upon releasing this cylinder the mechanism would rotate up and the elevator could extend.
In this implementation there was no synchronization to worry about as it was a single driven shaft.
~Zac