What's the dumbest thing you did that actually worked?

[Nazalassa]

On 9/21/2021 at 10:56 AM, jimmymcgoochie said:

How can you do that on 1st-level launch pad? 

Other than a new page?

[jimmymcgoochie]

First RP-1 career, I stuck a 2m Mercury capsule (well, stock Mk1 pod that's modelled on the Mercury capsule, scaled up to the size of a real Mercury capsule) on a 1.25m rocket. That's all I had to work with at the time, so I went with it.

The decoupler between the second stage and the base of the capsule had some solid rockets on it for launch abort purposes.

Well, second RP-1 career and I'm doing it again but with Gemini. The service module for the Gemini is ~3.9m in diameter, but the launch rocket is only 2m in diameter. It's actually even worse than last time...

This time around I've put the abort motors inside the Gemini's retrograde section (the top half of the service module) instead of the normal retro rockets.

I haven't had any aerodynamic issues at all with either of these designs. No, really.

2 hours ago, Nazalassa said:

How can you do that on 1st-level launch pad? 

Other than a new page?

I think it was a 60-ton pad, not the starting 20-ton one. This was some time ago, before stuff like residuals got added to RO and the requirement for full guidance for the first orbital contracts was added to RP-1; it almost certainly wouldn't work now, and even if it did it wouldn't really matter because it doesn't fulfil the contract parameters any more.

[Nazalassa]

Ah ok.