Capstan

Marines pushing on the bars of a capstan

The science fiction novel The City Who Fought has got me thinking about the design of spaceships for long distance travel. For voyages that last more than a few months, you're going to want some artificial gravity, and the only way we know how to produce that is with centrifugal force, meaning part of your spaceship will need to be spinning.

Giant spaceship with a string of habitable spheres arranged around a central pillar - ChatGPT

If your ship's engine produces a constant level of thrust,  then the amount of artificial gravity you will need will gradually decrease. Imagine having a string of spheres arranged around a central hub. If there is no thrust, the floor of these spheres would be parallel to the central axis and the spheres, and the speed of rotation would be at its maximum. As you start to apply thrust, you would need to tilt the spheres so that gravity remained pointing straight down. At the end of the voyage, when you have consumed all of your fuel, the speed of rotation would have decreased to zero and all gravity would be provided be the thrust of the engines.

Now you could use electric motors to drive the rotation, the central core would rotate one way and the the string of habitable spheres would rotate the other, but this voyage is liable to go on for months or even years, and one thing we've learned about people is that need something to do. So what we could go would be to make the rotation done using a capstan.

Every morning in Patrick O'Brian's novels, the day on shipboard begins with the ritual holy stoning of the decks. The capstan is only used when getting underway. On our space ship, the capstan would be used every day to adjust the speed of rotation to accommodate the change in our mass.