Project Orion: decouplers to orbit

[sdj64]

Here's a small product of fooling around I would like to show you all: A stock (except for Kerbal Engineer) spacecraft that gets to a stable orbit on nothing but decouplers. It takes advantage of the physics-insignificant large decoupler to provide about 120m/s of delta-V per pancake. If I doubled the size it would be able to reach the Mun and return (this thing is probably impossible to land though since it can't throttle down)

In the lower atmosphere:

Circularizing:

Highest orbit achieved of 400km apoapsis:

Not very practical, as it takes far too many decouplers to move even a .04 ton ship. But someone could hypothetically make a modded decoupler with several hundred thousand ejection force to have "build your own" Orion spacecraft.

[Overfloater]

Better than nuclear bombs! I've recently been wondering if it's possible to make a stock Orion... xD

[Claw]

I believe someone exploited decouplers in a way similar to this to get to the Mun in something like 13 seconds.

[sdj64]

Yes, I remember it was called Plaid. It used all the decouplers at once, though, to achieve ludicrous speed. More like a cannon than a rocket. Also depended on a zero-mass glitch (the entire ship was made of massless parts). Where as this one does have mass and is actually comparable in speed to a regular rocket.