ToughSf points us to Eric Berger who is... not exactly pointing to ARCA Space. ARCA Space are considering that we don't need reusability in our roggets if those roggets are trash cylinders. And you don't need the vertiginous height if you rivet more cylinders on the side... a lot of cylinders. The first thirty kilometers are the hardest, right?
Soyuz and Ariane have sort-of taken this Soviet line in their own rockets although, they go more vertical. Pity about SpaceX's Falcon 9 cutting them under.
ToughSf (and several Berger commenters) are recalling OTRAG. I didn't know what this was so I looked it up. Apparently it was some Germans who wanted a commercial spaceflight option. They couldn't fire their roggets in Germany (for several reasons) so went to Mobutu's Zaire. Then they went to Libya and, well, lost their roggets to the Libyans. That wacky Qaddafy!
Kerbal jokes aside, xkcd handles the engineering of a, er, 540 stage rocket. Still. OTRAG failed mainly due to the Cold War / Third World politics of the 1970s and 1980s. And if you don't want to build the insane vertical stacking-cranes we see in Boca then, horizontal seems the only choice.
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