A general question (in response to seeing mention of ship/gauge/HUD-specific stuff)...
How much support (if any) for doing stuff like... creating a HUD specific for one ship class, which copies all the properties of another HUD, but changes one aspect of it (without requiring the mod developer to basically copy-paste the entire thing)? Also, for stuff like defining positions relative to other stuff?
And will scripting be able to control HUD components, without having to fully recreate the HUD? I remember a while ago (and maybe to this day) it was rather frustrating that if you overrode the $On HUD Draw: scripting hook, you had to completely re-implement all of the parts of the HUD you didn't want to get rid of... Meaning getting rid of 1 gauge via scripting was as bad as adding dozens of gauges.
i wouldnt mind having hooks for some gauges, like radar and anything else that can be recreated with scripting fairly easily, like weapon info and different styles of lead indicators. these hooks might want variables like where its supposed to go, what size its supposed to be. of course that sounds somewhat complicated.
it might be easier just to disable certain gauges on certain ships, and place a scripted gauge in the resulting hole, crude but somewhat effective (and made somewhat easier if your first suggestion is implemented). it would help though if you could find out some info about the gauge you are replacing through scripting, like its position/size/color and other parameters. the script doesnt need to know what configuration your using, just what parameters are currently in use. and if you could disable and enable the gauge from the script as well (make it one of the parameters), then the scripter really doesnt need to concern themselves with the hud table at all.
also a small fiy, my attempt to render a hud to polygons in the cockpit model with scripting have hit a brick wall. seems i cant tell the hud to render at an arbitrary time, and if i recreate everything in scripting, i cant seem to draw anything transparent to the dynamic texture, so even if i could render the hud, the bitmap would be opaque and completely block your view. so li be keeping an eye on this, waiting for scrpting features to pop up.