Busy http servers, storage appliances and toasters are some notorious success deployments of NetBSD. Unfortunately not everybody is aware of some other gaps that NetBSD has filled. Once upon a time, there was a brave small team of programmers who did dare to choose NetBSD as a platform for their R&D software engineering department inside an aerospace and defense company. This resulted in some unusual use cases for NetBSD. This talk will present (1) a NetBSD-OS based tracking radar; (2) how NetBSD-OS served as a platform for supporting the software engineering department to design and implement software systems for rocket tracking radars; (3) how NetBSD Project served as a knowledge base for modelling that department's engineering processes. Furthermore, this talk will show how the unique features of NetBSD made it the most suitable OS for building rocket launching tracking radars deployed up to 3000 Km from the software engineering R&D lab, and how it helped to address challenges such as: Real-time data acquisition and processing Advanced visualization of radar data Radar systems simulation Air defense systems simulation Radar systems tests and quality assurance We'll also show how the choice for NetBSD made by an young software engineer, became a fundamental resource to deal with several aspects of bootstrapping an R&D software engineering department from ground up. Beyond an open-source OS, the NetBSD Project has an inherent open-governance and open-engineering nature, which made it a "body of knowledge" repository we used to find references for several software engineering related subjects.