Star Fighter Wing Trench Wars

Target acquired.

A gunner's control panel, cut down to a watch face: three readings across the top under a heading that reads ENERGY, a fighter held in your sights in the middle, and the time in hours, minutes and seconds along the bottom.

THE TARGET MOVES

It is not a picture of a gunsight. It is a lock. The fighter comes in off-centre and tumbling, swings across the sights with its own motion smearing behind it, and then it settles dead centre, holds for a beat, and the whole thing starts again. Under three seconds from first sight to lock, and it plays for as long as the face is on the screen.

THE TOP FRAME

Three cells divided by dotted rules, two rows each, and nothing off the grid.

• Left: the day's steps, with footprints, over how far through your goal they are
• Middle: the weekday and the day of the month, over your pulse
• Right: seven energy bars, over the charge you have left

THE ENERGY GAUGE

Seven bars, and the unlit ones are drawn too — dimmed, but drawn, because seven bars of which four are lit says four sevenths, and four bars alone says four. Full cyan down to four bars, steel at three, red at one. That is earlier than a battery warning usually comes, and it is meant to be: this is a fighter's energy readout, not a phone's battery icon.

It fades before it warns. This dial has no amber — two blues and a red, spent in that order.

THE CLOCK

Hours, minutes and seconds, in three pairs across the bottom frame with HRS, MIN and SEC under them. The seconds are real — they tick while you are looking at the watch.

THREE COLOURS, AND NOT A FOURTH

The dial invents no colour. The readings take the pale cyan of the dotted rules, the frames and the side instruments a steel blue one step below it, and the clock the red the target itself is lit in. The one warm thing on this dial is the thing in the crosshairs, and the time you are tracking it at.

WHAT IT SHOWS
• Hours, minutes and seconds, 12- or 24-hour
• Weekday and the day of the month
• Steps taken, and the per cent of your goal
• Heart rate, live
• Battery, as a seven-bar energy gauge and a per cent
• A targeting lock, on a loop

ON THE WRIST

Leave always-on enabled and the whole dial goes — target, readings, seconds, all of it — leaving the hour and minute alone in a dim red that drifts a few pixels each minute so no pixel carries a stroke for long. A screen full of bright lines is the last thing you want left on an AMOLED panel overnight, and it is not left there. Raise your wrist and the lock comes back.

YOUR DATA NEVER LEAVES YOUR WATCH

Your steps and your heart rate are read on the watch and shown on the watch. Nothing is collected, stored or sent anywhere — there is no server to send it to. The body sensors permission is the only one asked for, and it is what lets the pulse appear at all.

NO ADS. NO SUBSCRIPTION. NO ACCOUNT.

NOTHING ELSE TO SET UP

No menus to learn. Install it, choose it, and you are on the trigger. It follows your watch's own 12- or 24-hour setting.

A pilot's watch face — a targeting computer, a fighter gunsight, a ship in the crosshairs and a blue-on-black control panel.

An unofficial fan-made tribute. Not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by any film studio or rights holder.