HUD Instruments - Middle

Selected Target

To 'select' a target, point your ship in the general direction of the thing you're interested in (usually an enemy ship) and press the left button on the back of the joystick. Once this this done, your ship's instruments will keep track of the target and indicate its location even if you can't see it from your cockpit.

If you don't mind the HUD being more complicated than it is already, you can turn on the Predicting Gunsight by pressing the green 'HUD MODE' button in the middle of the dashboard the MFDs are mounted on.

A box appears around the ship you have targetted. Above the box is the pilot's call-sign, just to help you avoid shooting a 'friendly' by mistake. Below the box is the distance between you and the target. In the example above the target is 89 metres away.

The shape of the crosshair depends on the kind of ship you are flying, but they all do one thing: They show exactly where your ship is pointing. If your ship is perfectly at rest, the crosshair indicates where your bullets go when you fire them. In combat, though, your ship is never at rest if it is to avoid being a sitting duck, and the crosshair is often no help in dogfights.

To fix this problem, the Predicting Gunsight was invented. The yellow diamond-shaped predictor will show where the target will be by the time a bullet fired from your ship would travel to the same place, if you aimed your guns in that direction. Instead of aiming at the target directly, you aim at the yellow diamond.

Unless you have megawatt lasers for eyes, you will notice the problem of parallax when you fire at anything at close range. This happens with any gun that is mounted off to one side of the cockpit. The more distant a gun is from the front-back axis of the ship the stronger the parallax will be.
This is where the Parallax indicator comes in. The green circle shows where a bullet would end up if it travelled the same distance it would travel if it managed to hit the target. It's basically a floating crosshair.
The trick to accurate shooting is to simply line up the green circle with the yellow diamond and blast away.

The white diagonal cross indicates the direction your ship is moving. Unless you reverse, pull sharp turns, accelerate sideways or put the ship into 'acceleration mode', it should be pointing straight ahead. In the case of severe thruster damage, you can often still control the direction of your ship's motion by looking at the this cross and firing the appropriate set of thrusters.

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