I was watching a historical piece about bombers on the military channel, they had a segment on the effort in the late 50s - early 60s to build a nuclear powered jet engine and the airframe that might have carried it. Prototypes of the engine were built and tested. I don't think the airframe ever was built but drawings of the proposal probably exist.
Anyway, they did some CG animation of what the aircraft might have looked like, and it was very much like an enormous long EZ with jet pods slung along side the fuselage under the main wings. The canard was different; shorter and stubbier, but the main wings were near identical in planform, including the upper and lower winglets.
This got me wondering - was the CG animation artist familiar with the Rutan canard design, and simply borrowing it with some artistic license? Or did the original proposal actually look like that, and perhaps Burt had seen it and had some knowledge of the design parameters as a basis for his canard designs. The similarity was just too striking to dismiss as a coincidence.
