> yeah, it's called a train on steel railway tracks. lel > also the second-stage is tapered towards the bottom. it's hard to see, but makes sense if you think about it. i know. > fun fact: sergei korolev's design of the launch vehicle that became the soyuz rocket was done in the way that it was because the first-stage rocket boosters had to fit through the relatively narrow tunnels of the trans-siberian railroad. the well-choreographed booster stage separation that results in the "korolev cross" is purely a consequence of the size constraints of the transportation of the eventual design. this was a consideration, but not the main one. the reason the r-7 family (the soyuz is the best-known member of this family, but it isn't the "patriarch") has this configuration is because in those days, no one knew how to start a large liquid-propellant rocket engine at altitude, so the designers opted for a parallel-staged configuration. in fact, many different configurations were considered; a certain research institute of applied mathematics studied about fifty different configurations before selecting this one. the maximum diameter of the tanks in this vehicle is rather less than the loading gauge. there was a soviet launch vehicle whose configuration was dictated by these configurations, but it wasn't the r-7/soyuz; you're thinking of the ur-500 proton.
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