"All the rockets in the world today can be traced to those used during the wars in Mysore," says aerospace scientist Professor Roddam Narasimha, DST year-of-science professor, engineering mechanics unit of Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, who has been pursuing Tipu"s rockets as "an interesting sideline" for decades. "There is one single line of technology development that links those rockets to what the US, Russia and India are doing today ," he says. "It was Tipu who realized the full potential of rockets as weapons--both in his mind and on the field--and used them to create havoc in the East Indian Company lines."