For example, say the Moon was slowly getting closer to the Earth instead of moving away. If this occurred slow enough, the Earth and Moon could become tidally locked, always pointing the same face to each other.

I think the opposite is actually true.

The Earth-Moon system is already evolving towards being tidally locked. The Moon is already tidally locked with the Earth. As the moon saps rotational energy from the Earth via tidal interactions, it is accelerated to a higher orbit. Eventually, the Earth will be tidally locked with the moon, at which point there will be a permanent high tide in two regions (those parts of the Earth facing directly towards and away from the moon) and a permanent low tide in other regions (those areas on Earth that face perpendicularly to a line drawn between the centres of the two bodies).

Boskone had been mined by the bad guys and blew up without any help from the Patrol.

The next baddie on the list, they took out with a “free” planet. (That is, they stuck inertia-less drives on a planet, towed it to the appropriate location, then turned off the Bergenholms restoring the original inertial velocity). I think it might have been Ploor where the Patrol dropped two of them out of inertialess drive in a maneuver they called the “Nutcracker.”

The bad guys were getting smart enough to mount massive pressor beams to ward off free planets when Kinnison formed a brain trust to invent the physics for the Nega-sphere, which was sort of a strange combination of antimatter and black hole.

Meanwhile fun with hyperspacial tubes led to the discovery of a different dimension where the speed of light was much, much, much higher. The Patrol, never shy of taking risks with the physics of our universe, stuck engines on a planet there and got it moving really, really fast…and then dropped it back into our universe as an inertial object going several times the speed of light. Einstein may have screamed a little in his grave, but basically the result was lots of energy where a planet had been. And then THAT hit the sun of the last target on their list.

It would be a poetic sight, but sadly for the poets, the force of gravity on the two objects would destroy the hourglass shape as it was forming. Eventually, they’d be one larger globe.