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Ah yes Tupolev!  Indeed.

And we have the following  fine designs as examples of Tupolev's originality and creativity!


TU-4
TU-160
TU-180

[quote]Ah yes Tupolev!

I guess, well, when you have examples of the buran and the TU-144, it's not a stretch to imagine the TU-180

Tu-4 was a bolt-by-bolt copy
Tu-160 might look like a B-1A but its aerodynamically different (and gets to the B-1A advertised sped of M2.x)
Buran design is basically the best shape you can have... they planned to mount a bunch of normal jet engines on it for the second production series...

The coolest Tupolev is the Tu-144!

There was a superb documentary on Konkordski some years back on Channel 4 in the UK. They were showing how the KGB were using leaks in the French office at one point and they got an airport worker to scrape some rubber samples off the tarmac so they could copy the tyres as well. The DGSE (French Secret Service) had this chap come to them saying he'd been asked to do this so they supplied him with a rubber sample that in the words of the agent "Was like bubble-gum" and for ages they couldn't stop laughing about the thought of these poor Soviet scientists in some camp in the Urals trying to make tyres out of this rubber Possibly one of the greatest practical jokes EVER 8-)