i used standard chain link fence on top of my small greenhouse and it works even with such big "holes", no mechanism, just manual labor but needs good forecast which can be issue.
I'm intrigued. Can you expand more on this? Why does it work? I guess because the hail is rarely coming straight-on at the holes and instead makes more glancing blows off the wire?
In any case I think it's a perfect example of a good hack. Original out-of-the-box thinking producing an effective but unconventional solution. Chapeau bas!
but hail and flying debris i got past few years is so big and so frequent that im not sure chicken wire will do the job.
a lot of gardeners use shading cloth for lowering sun light intensity. but that is not always enough to withstand hail.
A lot of times there is multiple pieces of hail stuck in one hole. some just bounce off.
i have PV on roof and not had issue with that. but i had few broken glass pieces of greenhouse glass. even tho it is on same property. it is glass-glass bifacial, i did not do it for back light but for longevity, i saw too many plastic backing tear off, or delaminated or how to call it. so i did not want that. and im not sure if that is also factor in not having broken PV.
doing it on huge PV areas should atleast be by my feeling too much of hassle, investment.
But some people mentioned in other comments small arrays of, if i remember correctly, 5kWp. so that is roughly area im doing it on. so in those small arrays it can be done manually.
https://99percentinvisible.org/article/fruit-walls-before-gr...
https://www.atlasobscura.com/adventures/trips/peru-machu-pic...
(neighbors goats. i do not like animals, too much worry and work around diseases. there are tens, some years even hundred millions of chicken burned because of avian flu, pigs have african swine fewer,.... no thank you, corona cave bats of 2019, was enough for me...)