A splinky is a magnetic transport guideway built as a slender lattice of free-flying superconducting rings that hold formation by modulating their mutual fields. Adjacent rings carry opposing currents and so repel; biasing toward that repulsion and trimming about it lets each ring station-keep on its neighbours, holding the lattice extended and stiff much as the coils of a slinky hold one another apart, but with active control in place of any physical connection. The name is a colloquialism — superconducting-link, contracted by way of the toy — that displaced the formal designation in ordinary use.

A contiguous series of rings is a strand, anchored and powered at its ends and junctions by terminals. Because the rings are not joined, a strand is reconfigurable while live — individual rings can be ejected and replaced, and strands lengthened, split, merged, or rerouted — and it doubles as its own power bus, energy moving ring to ring by field modulation.

Vehicles do not sit on a splinky but enclose it. A vehicle’s collar wraps the strand, floats in the rings’ field, is steered by lateral redistribution of the rings’ flux, and reacts against the alternating ring poles to drive itself along — using the lattice, in effect, as distributed reaction mass.

Splinkies are used in two distinct regimes:

• In spin gravity (the inhabited interiors of gyrealms), a splinky is a levitated rail whose terminals double as supports, spaced at intervals of order twenty metres — a maglev line whose moving parts are entirely magnetic.
• In microgravity (axial regions, docks, and the hubs between co-rotating structures), a strand spans freely across hundreds of metres to kilometres without intermediate support. The crossing of the 2 km gap between the two sections of Coriopolis, routed near the low-gravity spin axis, is the best-known free-span installation.
• As free-floating reaction mass, an untethered strand becomes a propulsion infrastructure: a spacecraft pushes off it and gains velocity without onboard propellant, the rings recoiling and being recovered for reuse. Across a busy orbital cluster the rings are continually launched, caught, and re-formed into new strands — a choreographed circulation that gives the system its informal name, a magnetic ballet. See Theory of Operation.

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• Theory of Operation — governing physics, design basis, and the quantitative limits of the standard-gauge guideway.
• Ring Choreography — cluster-scale capture, momentum-banking, and redistribution of free rings: the ballet.