NTDS Icon Font • Peter Ellis Jones

NTDS Icons is an open-source font of naval tactical symbols. Browse every glyph at ntds.dronecomgame.com; it’s on crates.io and GitHub. These are real glyphs, rendered with the font in your browser:

Unit types

air

surface

subsurface

missile

Air contact, by affiliation

friend

enemy

unknown

neutral

An enemy surface contact, with overlays

plain

+ heading

+ destroyed

NTDS (Naval Tactical Data System) is the symbology on older naval command-and-control displays. Unlike the modern NATO/joint sets (MIL-STD-2525 and APP-6), the symbols are outlines rather than filled: the outline gives the warfare area — closed for surface, open at the top for air, open at the bottom for subsurface — and its form gives the affiliation, with a square for unknown.

I made it for DRONECOM, a naval strategy game with a tactical-console UI. No standalone NTDS font existed, so it’s generated from Rust geometry — the same shapes the game draws on its map.

The font is under the SIL Open Font License; the crate is MIT/Apache-2.0. You can see it in use in the DRONECOM manual’s symbology chapter.