Question sharing armature between offset skinned meshes

Hey, Im begining to feel like this is impossible due to unsuccesful searches and trials, but I would like to acheive the following:

I have multiple ropes (they are skinned meshes with armature that drive their shape/pose). The ropes are identical and I will always have them pose identically. That is to say, the local transform of bone_i in one rope is the same as the local transform of bone_i in the other ropes. The only difference is that i want the ropes to have a (constant) offset from one another (different root transform). I would like to drive all the ropes with a single set of armature, rather than a seperate set of armature per rope. Any tips or help is appreciated, even if it requires external tools like blender. Also if it truly is impossible, I'd love to know why. Thanks!

The pic below shows 2 of the ropes. I posed the top one, then duplicated it, and offset the duplicate. This clearly has a seperate set of armature per rope. It shows the result I would like though. I plan to dynamically pose the ropes identically at runtime. Just seems like unnecesary duplicate information crowding the scene hierarchy.