Vimana HUD

Overview

This HUD (Heads Up Display) is highly complex and can be augmented with a selection of equipment purchasable through the F3 screen while docked. Gnievmir from Poland burst onto the bulletin board as a new member offering this HUD as a gift! His original Vimana HUD altered some of the game mechanics, added some extra items for sale in the shipyards - and provided HUD lights for a variety of combat-related OXP equipment.

Dybal has taken on maintaining it, and has updated it and disentangled some of its dependencies. He has also made it compatible with the HUD Selector, sorted out the licensing issues and posted it on the Expansions Manager.

Description:

1    Target Module (if target selected) or Travel Module box (shown)
2    Active/primed equipment (with next piece of equipment to be selected shown beneath)
3    Equipment mode (if defined by b or n keys)
4    Fuel Injector (red if damaged or no fuel)
5    Low Fuel warning (insufficient for next witch-space hop)
6    Distance to Target (if selected)
7    Cloaking Device (if active)
8    ECM (red if damaged)
9    Self Repair System (oxp)
10   LMSS (Laser Mount Selection System) (oxp)
11   Current weapon
12   AMS Anti-Missile System darts count/status (oxp)
13   SRS Self Repair System bots count/status (oxp)
14   If visible - ship needs maintenance!
15   IronHide armour (oxp)
16   Extra Energy Unit
17   Shield Capacitors (oxp)
18   Shield Cycler (oxp)
19   Ship Status module box

Crosshairs

The matrix shows the variety of crosshairs depending on alert condition and on weapons being toggled on or off

Visual Alerts

Purchasable Additions

- Travel Module (TL6 1,000₢) shows multiple witchspace destinations - see (1) above

- Ship Module (TL6 1,500₢) shows damage status of ship - see (19) above

- Target Module (TL6 2,500₢) shows combat information with a nice icon of most of the probable targets

- Vimana Beam Laser (TL9 15,000₢) a cool-running military-style laser with only 25km range

- TFSystem (Target Filtering System, TL7 3,100₢) selects class of target: hostile, police, thargoid, neutral, asteroid etc

Aditional OXP

The ship overrides in version 2.05 have been moved to a separate OXP, Vimana Ship Overrides, available on the Expansion Manager in the Ships category.

Those overrides make VimanaHUD the default HUD for many core game ships, and increase ship properties like cargo capacity, flight speed, number of pylons, energy banks.

The reason for the move is that some players will want to stay with the original ship's characteristics and can use HUD Selector to change theirs HUD into Vimana HUD.

Players that are using VimanaHUD v2.05 are advised to install this additional OXP before loading the saved game of a ship that has cargo based on the expanded capacity granted by v2.05, or cargo loss will result.

The Name

The Sanskrit word vi-māna (विमान) literally means "measuring out, traversing" or "having been measured out". Monier Monier-Williams defines Vimana as "a car or a chariot of the gods, any self-moving aerial car sometimes serving as a seat or throne, sometimes self-moving and carrying its occupant through the air; other descriptions make the Vimana more like a house or palace, and one kind is said to be seven stories high", and quotes the Pushpaka Vimana of Ravana as an example. It may denote any car or vehicle, especially a bier or a ship as well as a palace of an emperor, especially with seven stories. In some Indian languages like Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu, and Hindi, vimana or vimanam means "aircraft", for example in the town name Vimanapura (a suburb of Bangalore) and Vimannagar, a town in Pune. In another context, Vimana is a feature in Hindu temple architecture (from Wikipedia - see below).