(I have no idea what i'm talking about.)

And yet I actually follow what you are saying, silly it may be, it is... theoretically, technically sound.

So for spinning rooks, (especially when accelerated to rotational velocities experienced in a coil gun), to avoid the gimbal lock problem, you can use quaternions to represent their actual orientation, which... more or less, is complexifying their 3D orientation vector into being a 4D object, manipulating it in 4 space, and then solving or reducing the 4D object back to its 3D shadow/original self, to know its 3 space orientation.

This is particularly helpful when playing any kind of chess that involves more than 2 dimensions, as well as keeping track of long distance ballistic deviation due to projectile wobble, and/or a ballistic trajectory through different ambient pressure/resistance/drag-inducing gradients.