so i was simulating tidal locking with a moon exploded into 273 parts. It was orbiting around the moon fine, and then it was like it hit a brick wall and the moon was suddenly turned flat as a pancake. It didn't bounce back into a sphere or anything, it just stayed flat. i reloaded the simulation and played it: the moon exploded.
what i found really cool was that when i turned the timestep down really far, i could see that the explosion somehow gave the moons a large amount of rotational momentum and they were all spinning very quickly