Name: ZULU — Tactical Military Watch Face
Rating: 4.8 (4 reviews)
Author: nagamine-git

ZULU is a tactical military watch face for Instinct 3 and Instinct E, built around the three things field soldiers actually glance at: time, grid, and light.

MISSION TIME
- Big colonless military time (0942) with ghosted seconds. Four typefaces: a custom stencil-DIN drawn pixel by pixel (default), Overpass from the Highway Gothic road-sign lineage, Saira, and your watch’s own system numerals. The custom face is tuned for white-on-black reading — wide digits, open counters, generous letter spacing
- DTG line (160050Z) — Zulu/UTC date-time group, the military standard format. Optional double size; the large time can also be set to Zulu
- Local date (SUN 16 AUG)

LIGHT DISCIPLINE (the astro brief, computed offline — no connection needed)
- BMNT and EENT (nautical twilight) — the Army’s light-condition planning times
- Sunrise / sunset, moonrise / moonset
- 24-hour astro dial in the manner of pilot 24h watches: numerals every two hours, noon on top (or midnight, or the current hour), one light ring that steps out from a hairline at night to twilight to daylight, cut at dawn, sunrise, sunset and dusk, plus moon phase + illumination % (moonlight drives night vision performance). A moon arc shows the hours the moon is up, so the truly dark window — no twilight, no moon — reads straight off the dial. 12 dial styles, incl. two-tone day/night and GMT-style analog
- Optional world map with day/night shading and your position, shown in place of the brief

WEATHER (optional, needs a phone)
- The five military aspects of weather: visibility, wind, cloud cover, temperature and humidity — from FM 34-81-1, which also defines the light data above. Wind reads as bearing and speed in knots, the way it is called on a net
- Or show both at once: dawn, sunrise, sunset, dusk, moonrise, moonset, plus wind and visibility on one screen
- The astro brief stays the default. It is computed on the watch and needs no connection; weather does

BEARINGS WITHOUT A COMPASS (optional)
- Where the sun and the moon are right now, and the bearings of sunrise, sunset, moonrise and moonset — all as true bearings in three digits
- This is the field-expedient navigation of FM 3-25.26 put into numbers: when a compass cannot be trusted, near iron, in a magnetic anomaly, or simply broken, the sky still gives you north
- Computed from your position and the time. No sensor is switched on for it, so it costs nothing in battery and works with no phone
- Or put the current sun and moon bearings above the full weather brief, so both are on the face at once and neither has to be switched in

POSITION
- MGRS grid from your last known position — Military Grid Reference System. Selectable precision (6 / 8 / 10-digit, 8 by default) and format (MGRS, Deg-Min, Decimal)

READINESS
- Battery, steps and readiness (Body Battery or heart rate) as instrument bars; battery can read as days remaining
- Sitting: the dotted track under the steps bar turns solid in thirds as you sit — ten, twenty, thirty minutes without walking. A 2024 meta-analysis of 13 randomised trials found that breaking up sitting every 30 minutes lowers post-meal glucose, while hourly breaks do not — so this runs on its own 30-minute clock rather than the watch's hourly move bar. Can be turned off.
- NO LINK appears beside the date-time group when the phone is not connected, so you can tell whether the weather brief is current. Nothing is drawn while the phone is connected.

Pure black & white, engineered pixel-by-pixel for the 1-bit MIP display. No logo, no decoration — a sterile dial in the tradition of MIL-W-46374 field watches. Battery-friendly: astro data computed once per day, optional gesture-only seconds.

From the same maker: RECON — a tactical face with weather, pressure trend and nine analog subdials. ZULU ANALOG — the ana-digi sibling of this face, with the same astro dial on an analog movement.

The Overpass typeface is Copyright 2021 The Overpass Project Authors, used under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.