Why not terrain that interacts?

I am sure you can use money to get around that risk. Certainly not reasonable to do for Uber, but possible.

if it had 3d planets, of course!
EDIT- in reality even w/out 3d planets the only thing that holds TA now is it's interface, if compared w/ SupCom/PA UI, TA UI is the worst.

There is only one way around:
Opening an second company outside the US (e.g. a Limited Copmany in the UK), and transfer the ownership of the software to that company, and thereby cheat around the fucked up US patent system. Worst case scenario? Someone in the US tries to sue you, which results in your software getting banned from being re-imported to the US.

PS: Latter one might also happen when someone reverse engineers your software and finds traces of patent law violations. So not much differs, except for the source being available to the rest of the world.

Maybe the Source code can get "leaked" somehow? ;D

Leaked source code does not protect from that steaming pile of *** the US patent law is. On the contrary, it would make Uber directly open to patent law parasites which do nothing but suing software companies over violations of trivial software patents which should never have been granted in the first place.

So if someone broke into a game company let's say and stole hard drives with the source code or whatever.. Uber would be held accountable? O . O

If someone then used that stolen source code to claim that Uber had violated any patents: Yes.

Well there's another question : Let's say this pattent issue does not exist, would Uber consider to release the source code ?

Probably not as long as PA is making any money, and then some.
Edit: I remember John Mavor saying that they would have released the TA source code if they had won the rights to it, so they are not closed to such ideas, but in the end there is still the stupid US law...

again wrong TA only had 2D graphics, the units and projectiles interacted in 3D

Not necassarily, it's kind of unusual. Okay- So for example subs ran into ships because there was no actual depth in the water. They were both on the same plane. There are height maps though- Which is a bit of pseudo 3D, and not to mention every unit and projectile was a sprite iirc.

Besides you know exactly what I meant, I meant that it had 2D graphics, if you read a little further you'd know that! I was talking about how much simpler it'd be to make without having to deal with REAL 3D like PA (On spheres!)

Edit: Just to clarify on all this what I mean to say is that I didn't mean TA is LITERALLY 2D. Don't be so picky. =)

@tatsujb