Creating an up-rated version of the Stanford Torus mod Mass Accelerator

[Northstar1989]

For those of you who have never heard of the Stanford Torus mod, it's a great, interesting mod that I stumbled across recently. Here's a link to the CurseForge page where it is maintained/released:

http://www.curse.com/ksp-mods/kerbal/221761-stanford-torus-0-5

It includes a Mass Accelerator part, but those parts provide FAR too little acceleration, and have far too high of a per-unit price (in Career Mode), to actually be usable...

The mod is licensed under a CDDL 1.0 license, however- an open source lincense meaning that any part of the product can be modified, reproduced, and/or redistributed provided the source is still provided (the license also requires the Initial Developer to provide a copy of the source), and it is noted who the Initial Developer was and who made the modifications to the product...

http://opensource.org/licenses/CDDL-1.0

Thus, I would like some help in creating a fork of just the Mass Accelerator from this awesome mod, and up-rating it to realistic force levels (giving credit to michaelhester07 for his awesome original work, of course). The part currently produces 250 kN of force per second (each part produces 250 kN of force for 0.5 seconds, and they can be stacked), whereas a real-world mass accelerator proposal as part of the Star Tram system would produce approximately 11,760 kN of force per second, according to calculations from the vessel size and acceleration (40 tons and 30 g's for Star Tram).

The original mod author has the right relation between power consumption and force produced, though: 1 MW = 100 kN/s. Which represents a roughly 10% efficient electromagnet.

Basically, I just want help in the right way to set up a thread re-distributing a forked version of this one part, which I will make the modifications to for up-rating its force and power consumption to realistic levels, and reducing its Career Mode costs by *at least* 80-90%... (currently it costs 185,000 per part)

As I understand it, a fork needs to include:

- The (forum?) name of the Initial Developer, and credit to him for creating the original mod

- My name (forum name is acceptable, I presume?), and a notice on the modifications I made

- Copies of both the original and modified source code

Is that everything? Is there anything else I'm missing? And how exactly would I get the source- I don't actually *see* a file or link labeled "source" anywhere on the mod release site, even though the Initial Developer (the mod author) is legally required to provide it with that license.

Regards,

Northstar

Edited October 27, 2014 by Northstar1989

[SpannerMonkey(smce)]

Hi, I had a look around for the source and it's not out there, presumably one of the reasons that the owner no longer updates his thread in the dev section. Which of course makes his OS license rather pointless, perhaps he decided on the license then changed his mind about sharing the source.

A step you should make anyway is to contact the owner maintainer and see if he'll give you access. It's the polite thing to do.

I don't believe it's a legal requirement to post a src link but it is part of the squad posting rules

[Northstar1989]

Hi, I had a look around for the source and it's not out there, presumably one of the reasons that the owner no longer updates his thread in the dev section. Which of course makes his OS license rather pointless, perhaps he decided on the license then changed his mind about sharing the source.

A step you should make anyway is to contact the owner maintainer and see if he'll give you access. It's the polite thing to do.

I don't believe it's a legal requirement to post a src link but it is part of the squad posting rules

I'll try to message the mod author, but I don't believe he's very active anymore...

This just struck me, but would there even *be* a separate source-code for this part? It doesn't come associated with any .dll files or anything- just a .CFG part and some textures. So, it's possible the mod author created the thing entirely from Notepad/Wordpad, and never actually had to *create* a separate source in the first place... (source codes are only used where the file of interest uses a compiler, right?)

The license also only requires source files for executable files (of which there are none), so technically the mod author wasn't required to post a source (if such a file even exists). And Squad might not require me to post one for my fork of the part??

Reading the Wikipedia definition of "source code" would imply there isn't one here, as a .CFG file is already "human-readable" and in text form...

"source code is any collection of computer instructions (possibly with comments) written using some human-readable computer language, usually as text."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_code

Forgive me if I sound silly here- I'm not very familiar with programming.

Regards,

Northstar

Edited October 27, 2014 by Northstar1989