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Me, an expert? Far be it from me! I just have a bit of google-fu and an unending fascination for both Elite and Frontier, even though the latter's Newtonian physics are fiendishly difficult for me!Cody wrote:As I said, you're the expert! I won't even bother to correct you!
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Agreed.maik wrote:Sounds reasonable
) and thanks for sharing it.) to create an Oolite-clone of ED. What I would like to see though is the addition of a very nicely modeled circular orbital station. Rest assured that credit from where the idea was taken will be in the readme. Oolite and ED are very different games (ED is much more simulator than Oolite) and are no competitors of each other, although they share the same basic characteristics and building blocks. However, Oolite's advantage compared to ED is the ability to load your own modded content. 
Solar panels +infinity and we could name it Solar Torus OXPdertien wrote:What I could do to make it look different, and just as good is that the spiky things at the bottom could be split in two and opened up (like a beak of a bird that is wide open) which would then be the solar panels. Another option is to change the triangular container things and change the shape to hexes. Three rings would be overkill IMHO; but I could add some solar panels again in Hex form to the bottom of the ball, and change the shape of the ball at the rear to be more like elongated liquid gas containers, like the ones you find on trains.
We'll see, its WIP and anything goes at the moment, and thx for the comment Pagroove.
Disembodied wrote:IANAL either, but one thing worth bearing in mind: what is or is not legal - especially with regard to something as hard to define as intellectual property - is something which, eventually, is decided in court, after numerous appeals. Look at the pantomime of Apple v. Samsung. Now, if you are Apple, or Samsung, or some other global behemoth, you can factor in a few hundred million in annual legal costs as part of your strategy to make things awkward for your competitors (and to prevent your product line being gazumped by some smartass startup with a bright idea that threatens to kick you in the corporate knackers - which doesn't always work, cf. Dyson v. Hoover, although this did take more than 20 years to sort out): this is known as "the free market".
I don't think that Frontier Developments see Oolite as any sort of threat: in fact, I think that David Braben probably sees us for what we are, a homage to Elite, which has had only a positive effect on keeping interest in the game alive, and one that's now providing a free advert for E:D. As long as we are scrupulously noncommercial, I don't think we have anything to worry about. Making a space-station model inspired by a station type from E:D, to include, for free, in a noncommercial game, is probably fine, too. And tweaking it to make it into e.g. one more type of torus station is sensible.
Basically, whether something is legal or not doesn't matter. If a great big Cease and Desist falls on us out of the sky, what will happen is that Oolite will Cease and Desist, because such is the way of the world. Legal and illegal, right and wrong don't enter into it: money talks, and we ain't got none. It's not likely to happen, and I think that any unreasonable (for an indeterminate value of unreasonable) attempt by FD to slap Oolite down would generate a small amount of bad publicity; but it always remains a possibility.
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