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Honestly, maybe partially scale, but not really. It's more a factor of what it was meant to do.

Going to the moon means extra hardware on top, which means more fuel, which means lower TWR at launch.

If you're just going to drop a 6000kg bomb on earth somewhere, you need a lot less rocket on top of that first stage, and it's going to take off a lot faster.

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I think we're just going in circles now. The scale was a result of what it was meant to do. The extra hardware on top and extra fuel all add to the scale of it. It was a massive rocket because it needed to do a massive job.

Anyway, I think we've gone off track from the original point, which was that full size launch vehicles taking off slow isn't because of gimbals vs. fins, it's because they're big and heavy.

We can be pedantic and say it's specifically because of a low T-W ratio, but the T-W is low because the weight is high and it's not practical to build a massive rocket engine to increase it.

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