Rockets
Mysore’s army used iron-cased rockets in numbers, and used them well — at Pollilur in 1780 they broke a Company force badly. Captured examples were taken to the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich, where they informed William Congreve’s rocket work. It is one of the few clear cases of a military technology travelling from India into Europe rather than the reverse.
Legitimacy, and its limits
Tipu sent an embassy to Constantinople seeking recognition from the Ottoman sultan as caliph, struck coins and a calendar on his own reckoning, and corresponded with revolutionary France. He was building a claim to sovereignty that did not run through Delhi.
It did not hold. In the Third War the **Nizam of Hyderabad** and the Marathas joined the Company against him — the reason this entry connects to the rest of this corpus at all. He lost half his territory in 1792, and his life in 1799.
The last day
Srirangapatna was stormed on 4 May 1799. Tipu was killed in the breach, fighting; the account that he was offered surrender and refused is contemporary and credible. He is among the very few Indian rulers of the period who died in arms rather than in negotiation, which is a large part of why the argument about him has never settled.