Symplectic integrators are the preferred method of solving conservative N-body problems in cosmological, stellar cluster, and planetary system simulations because of their superior error properties and ability to compute orbital stability. Newtonian gravity is scale free, and there is no preferred time or length-scale: this is at odds with construction of traditional symplectic integrators, in which there is an explicit time- scale in the time-step. Additional time-scales have been incorporated into symplectic integration using various techniques, such as hybrid methods and potential decompositions in planetary astrophysics, integrator sub-cycling in cosmology, and block time-stepping in stellar astrophysics, at the cost of breaking or potentially breaking symplecticity at a few points in phase space. The justification provided, if any, for this procedure is that these trouble points where the symplectic structure is broken should be rarely or never encountered in practice. We consider the case of hybrid integrators, which are used ubiquitously in astrophysics and other fields, to show that symplecticity breaks at a few points are sufficient to destroy beneficial properties of symplectic integrators, which is at odds with some statements in the literature. We show how to solve this problem in the case of hybrid integrators by requiring Lipschitz continuity of the equations of motion. For other techniques, such as time-step subdivision, consequences to this problem are not explored here, and the fact that symplectic structure is broken should be taken into account by N-body simulators, who may find an alternative non-symplectic integrator performs similarly.
