The Worms video game series has a fun item: ropes.
These ropes are rigid but you can vary the length, so you can do a bunch of interesting pendulum behaviors to accelerate yourself.
If you had a long tether between two objects of different weights, and the whole system is rotating, I feel like you could get some interesting acceleration effects by rapidly shortening the tether (assuming its strong enough to not snap)
Yes I remember this, go from long to short with perfect timing and a perfect release moment and you fly off to a ridiculous distance, but the physics didn’t feel wrong about it. So it would make sense that there is something in this.
I wish I could remember one of these games in which players were tiny cars with ridiculously ominous names like Monsieur Murder (i'm paraphrasing but that was the vibe)
These ropes are rigid but you can vary the length, so you can do a bunch of interesting pendulum behaviors to accelerate yourself.
If you had a long tether between two objects of different weights, and the whole system is rotating, I feel like you could get some interesting acceleration effects by rapidly shortening the tether (assuming its strong enough to not snap)