HTL Zeus has a cockpit texture with transparent HUD screen, if that's what you mean by "black thing".
In theory, it should be compatible with all previous cockpits... And it kinda is, too. The problem is that none of the pre-Zeus cockpits have HUD screens that are designed to be transparent, so the transparency causes very annoying effects on any of the old fighters. Mainly so that when you look through the HUD, it is transparent all right - but so is your ship behind it. In the bottom of the screen you actually see through your ship's nose, and it's kinda annoying. I suspect that it's because some vertices/polys in the HUD screen criss-cross each other or are too close or have inverted normals or something like that, I dunno.
All the HUD screens should be either fixed to be similar with the ones in HTL Zeus or alternatively be moved away altogether, if the cockpit view is wanted to be widely usable/used.
The problem wouldn't be too bad if it considered only cockpit view, but if any ship with cockpit uses the same texture with HTL Zeus cockpit, the HUD and the ship behind it becomes transparent also from the outside... Which is kinda wrong and evil, you're not supposed to have holes in your spaceship (and much less your body...)