what i want to do is make a rocket launcher that fires a rock that smashes itself a few feet into the ground and explodes. i cant make this happen with the vanilla rocket launcher

learn to mod a little bit, Copy the rocket launcher to a new .rte, Edit the ammo, change the gib-impulse so it wont explode on impact, Then give it a Lifetime, so that it explodes at the end of its time, Then shoot it into the ground, It will punch a hole and get stuck, then after a few seconds, it will explode.

Its not that hard, unless you have NO clue what your doing. Start simple. use templates. Experiment and fiddle.

when the lifetime expires, the rocket just leaves existance without anything happening,

I believe the variable you are looking for is TriggerDelay...

aaaahhh i see, thankyou! How would i increas the sharpness and the strength of the rockets booster?

MOSR and AEmitter, Can NOT have sharpness.

You can make the rocket booster stronger, by editing the AEmitter to increase the burst size, the emisions per minut, and what particle is emited,

More emitted particles, Or heavier emitted particles, will result in more thrust. Alternatively, you can make the missile Heavier.

What he means is, find the particles that rockets emit
through their main thruster (It should be in the Effects
folder and in the Pyro.ini) and increase their mass and
sharpness to make the rocket's booster better.

raise particlesperminute on everything, and raise the mass and sharpness of the AEmitter. sharpness does work, miles is wrong.