[notahacker]

Yep.

Reminds me of the old path dependency story about the dimensions of the Saturn booster rockets being determined by the official dimensions for Roman war chariots (and in turn, by the width of a horse's ass). The rockets were transported through tunnels by rail, which used a 4'8 gauge determined by the British, who supposedly based their standard gauge on the width of wheel ruts in their ancient roadways because they were more used to designing horses and carts. Except that the early railways used a range of gauges that were only later standardised, and tunnel widths would have been broadly similar even if they'd standardised on a slightly larger or smaller gauge because the real determining factor in early tunnel boring was to bore the smallest possible tunnel with a cylindrical cross section which could accommodate carriages in which passengers could stand...

And more importantly, the booster rockets were a fair bit smaller than the actual width of the tunnels they were transported through because rocket aerodynamics also favour small cylindrical cross sections. Even if there had never been people called Romans to specify war chariot widths or even creatures called horses, or the US had standardised on 7' gauge also widely used in early English railways, they'd probably have ended up the same size.