crab

While I cant cite numbers I would think it should be fair enough to say that the types that buy this throttle (particularly were first day buyers) are also the types that surf this forum; enough so that it would seem reasonable to make the assumption that a lack of confirmation here likely means they haven't shipped just yet.

The Warbird seems best to me as an option for using on the desktop where extensions aren't a factor because the last thing you want is to get the stick higher. If you're mounting between the legs with their mount or something custom why wouldn't you go with what is already the known working Virpil solution?

It needs about 3 seconds to fully open, I've seen some time it at 2.8 or thereabouts but I find 3 gets it every time. It has to be set up so that it will only be on for a set time and then stop or else you get the command being sent endlessly which can block other commands you may want to give while on brake. It's easy enough to set up correctly but doing so isn't entirely intuitive. Frugal hit quite a few other common setup scenarios in one of his videos, would recommend that one for certain. A quick search will turn up setting the speedbrake so it timers off when slid on and will command close when when the slider is pulled back to the off position.

Nah, you're good to go with the Logitech software. You'll find the HOTAS commands function well so you'll likely want to get those on profile. YouTube has some good videos to help out with the tougher ones; speedbrake comes to mind.

Yep, seconded. This would make life easier for everybody because it just plain works.

I set the axes in DCS and did everything else with the Logitech software.

Yep. No room for pedals at work for example so I use a twist stick (x-56) for rudder, I don't like it but I've no choice. I'm hopeful we'll get a flight sim oriented review soon, I've little interest in the space stuff or how gear works in that environment.

You can assign commands to mode but you have to be in the grid view, never occured to me to delete one, I'll have to check that out later. I'm using the throttle thumb as my throttle designator via axis, works well for that with a 25% command and 50% dead zone. I use the stick thumb as a POV hat with a similar setup but banded; 15% on each end command and the middle all dead. Seems strange but it ends up working as well as a hat although you cant go 8 way. I also found you could use a similar setup and make it like a 4 way hat with good results; I did this to get the AA weapon select commands on there in F18 before I changed it to a POV. Same deal, huge dead area and it ends up working pretty reliably. I agree with you though, the thumbsticks are weak for flight sims and I think even the space guys seem to think they could use some improvement based on the tone of posts over there.

When does the review embargo lift?

Roger. It's no fun but easy enough to do once you bite the bullet and get started. For me the results were worth it but I'm not sad to be done with it for the moment. Like many I'd jump on another HOTAS in a hearbeat if someone ever gets something on the shelf worth jumping at.

If you want to leverage all the goodies you'll need to wander over to Logitech and download their not so great software to set up the throttle. You may want to consider watching a few of the Youtube videos about programming it, there are a number of things you can do with the software that cant be done in DCS and it isn't that hard to learn. Mostly it's irritating in that you have what appears to be about a 600x800 box to work in that cant be resized and may be stupidly small on your monitor depending on your resolution.

lol, they're not answering emails. Also my bet is the largest chunk of their business by a good margin comes from people who browse this forum and whats more they know it and monitor regularly; I know I would. A more likely answer is that business as usual over there means you don't answer when you have nothing on the shelf and so they're not. I would also say that people who have handed over cold cash in exchange for promised goods ARE in fact entitled to an explanation when those goods have not shipped as promised.

I took a lot of heat when I said much the same in a discussion about VKB. And if I may say so, also made some purchases that might have been considered a risk by some. It's all good if you go in eyes open. I am BTW rooting for you and all the rest of the folks with orders in, and for Virpil for that matter. I might just test the waters myself if things start looking up. :)

I've been there, they do what I described just as I described it and you are living that "generalization" right now. It doesn't matter if you're talking Belorussian, Georgian, whatever, this behavior is ubiquitous across the whole of the former Soviet Union and only the extent really changes. In my mind calling it a generalization is a bit of a push because you could grab anyone off the street in Russia or any former soviet state and they would have predicted what you see here. I don't agree with it and you're not wrong, it's a very poor way to do business across much of the world where we expect things to actually work; I say this having run my own business for more than 40 years. Mrs Crab works as a consultant helping enterprises from Russia and various former soviet states reach out into the wider world and she would tell you much the same as she deals with this and related issues on a daily basis but understands it in a way I never will. Those things you say they need to do make up the bulk of her work. As to the reasons, they could be those you listed but you're thinking like a westerner. There are a hundred others that fall into the everything is broken category; we're are talking about production in a place where the rule is things don't work very well and working well is an expectation held by no one. I'm in the market myself and lusting after new hardware but didn't pre-order and I'm surprised you did knowing how things work over there.

Assembly time has nothing to do with whats going on here. Any one of us could have probably assembled every order they have by ourselves during the time period they've delivered all these failed promises. Mrs Crab is Russian, despite her rather impressive academic credentials and years as a professor she still cant quite explain to me how it is they tolerate all the fail involved in just about everything over there. Trying to get your car repaired? Expect many broken promises about when parts will come, when the work will actually get done, and once done without fixing the problem about how the next attempt will fix it. Of course every Russian knows the next fix may or may not fix it because thats how it alwasy works and most such promises have the word maybe attached to it. "Your car will be ready on Thursday. Maybe." Russians expect things to fail, they don't believe any promises about when work will be done and know it will probably be far longer than estimated for everything and anything. It's completely pervasive in every aspect of their lives. They will schedule a day to do an errand there that I would set aside an hour to accomplish here and they're not wrong; often enough they'll need the day to do something that should be so much simpler. And no, I don't hate em, I love em. I first started going over there in the early 90s to train engineers in my field. When you first get there it seems the people are cold because they don't smile as a pleasantry as we do here. When you do it older people they can become upset because they think you may be mocking them: Why else would you be smiling when nothing funny happened? Get to know them better and you find they are a warm and generous people who I greatly like. Their country on the other hand is downright broken in many respects. No one there who was buying a joystick from a Russian company would have expected it to ship because they know all such promises are hollow at best and highly unlikely to be realized. Russian people will often wait for an apartment they purchased in a building that is already almost done for a year. Sometimes years. These things are ubiquitous and sellers are almost expected to make promises that everyone knows will not come to pass any time soon. I'm not sure I've done a great job of explaining this because I often find these things inexplicable despite having seen them for a good many years now. It's hard to say exactly whats going on with these orders. Did they use sold orders as finance money? Maybe. Did they try and score some black market parts from a friend of a friend who has an uncle that can get the goods cheap on the black market and it all went sideways? Maybe. Did they fail to pay off the right person and the orders are all awaiting some bureaucratic sign off? Maybe. The only thing you can be sure of is assembly has nothing to do with it. You could have trained the cat to assemble these things faster than they're shipping.

Did you purchase the old one or the updated X56?

He has a few pics up now, best view of the throttle I've seen.

Agree with pretty much all of that. The throttle uses (what appears to be) an uncatalyzed adhesive to provide friction. To fix it you need to open it up and scrape out the excess. The isn't anything to it, remove every screw you see on the bottom and once open stay removing goo; what you need to do will be obvious once you see the mechanism. I did it a couple times to get a reasonable friction level. It's sticky and won't come off of your scraping tool, hands, or anything else, easily. I found carb cleaner made short work of it. Once done the throttle movement will be a little lumpy out the gate but it smoothes 6itself out after a short time once it's motion had redistributed the goo evenly.

I have an X56 for work and a Cougar for home. Both work fine but are different things. The X56 is a sub 200 dollar joystick on Amazon and feels like it: Relatively cheap plastics, movements are not as precise as the pricier options, switch gear is from the bargain bin, etc. The Cougar is much like the Warthog, a more expensive option and like comparing a Camry to a C63, one is twice as expensive and you feel the difference every flight. I've a feeling the Warthog would be comparatively the same way. As far as the Eastern stuff VKB has excuses on offer but no sticks, you'll be lucky to see something for sale months from now (shows September on their site) but only if you click into their site daily and be one of the lucky few that gets a stick before both are sold. If not you can pray your one of the few that gets lucky the next time they sell a few sticks months after that. Virpil appears to me to be a decent stick but not as good as the VKB; as a significant plus your patience may be rewarded in the same calendar year making them at least theoretically available. Both lack throttles as of today although Virpil may actually be shipping theirs if you were in on the first lot pre-order. VKB says Christmas time but maybe later, I'd expect later. I'm going to replace my Cougar with something but realistically there isn't much out there. VKB isn't even an actual functioning business; you cant order anything now and you cant even get on a list and wait. Virpil at least appears to be on the cusp of becoming a working business that has a product to sell so I'll likely go that way. To be honest I really hope Logitech does bring a product into the high(er) end space because no one is trying all that hard in it right now. They sell because buyers don't have better options to throw money at.

What I find really interesting about it is that it's a day one problem complained about (seemingly) by the first owner and seconded by many after. The interesting part isn't that, it's that it's not fixed and the fix is nothing more than paying attention and using a different fastener at essentially no cost. Lack of competition is never good.

More travel can produce finer control movements for precision flying. I'm not sure how they're measuring their arcs but my X56 seems at first glance to have less than described. I haven't used the warthog so I cant compare to it but it's significantly less than my Cougar.

Barley-wine? Love that stuff! :)

I find I often enjoy of glass of wine or two myself when flying my virtual F18. Pilot performance goes down precipitously however when your alcohol loadout gets more extensive. More seriously I've the feeling you're a non-native English speaker making that a wee bit of a cludge to parse out. :)

AA you roll the designator over and designate. It's called something like throttle designator in the HOTAS section of the commands; you'll recognize it when you see it. You'll probably be wanting to add those to your HOTAS configuration. Undesignate is on the pinkie switch, select that and you'll return to search. If there is a way to bug targets without locking I haven't figured it out yet.

The sensor controls (up, down, left, right, designate) all have button mapping, it's one of the comma, period, forward slash semi-colon mappings. Undesignate is rolled into the pinkie switch NWS/undesignate command which also has a button mapping, I'm thinking it's S but I cant remember for sure. If you go to the HOTAS section of the controls you see them as something like sensor left, right, and so on. All should function correctly with their layered commands after you place them. Am I making this too simple? I feel like I must have missed the question.