Re: Asked to put a square peg in a round hole, I would:

[perldigious]

Well, as an engineer who has written my fair share of requirements documents used for legally binding contracts, I would say that your requirements are vague and ill defined. I mean, how big is the round hole compared to the square peg? What material is the hole in and what is the peg made of? What tooling is available for changing the size of either the hole or the peg and what are the cost projections for both non-refundable engineering and recurring manufacturing per unit? What constraints exist based on other project requirements? What regulatory certifications are necessary for product sale? Has legal reviewed this yet?

Obviously we need to secure a modest amount of funding from the customer for initial feasibility and R&D studies before we can even begin to talk about defining and quoting such a complicated project... $50,000, USD, should be enough, we'll get back to you in a month. :-)

[syphilis]

$50,000, USD, should be enough

What about the Environmental Impact Study ?? .... better make it $150,000.

Cheers,
Rob

[BillKSmith]

Requirements for a programing project are seldom much better. We usually use the hammer and then wait for the customer to tell us what he really wanted.

[cavac]

I'd say it also depends on the relative speed at which the square peg is moving in relation to the round hole. If we are talking about opposing near earth orbits, neither the shape of the peg nor the shape of the hole will have any significant role in the ultimate end result. An impact at roughly 16 kilometers (10 miles) per second tends to reform the shape of the participating objects anyway. It also tends to turn parts of the objects to plasma and the rest to hypervelocity bullets, so there are downsides, too.

But all in all, at these kinds of speeds, for a fraction of a nanosecond, the square peg and the round hole will be a perfect fit, no problem. It's only what happens next that will make you want to be not the engineer responsible for the experiment.