Setting up flight controls

[Tmi]

Hello,

I was watching the video above and it got me wondering how would one go about setting up a non-ffb flightstick in order to replicate at least some parts of that quite sophisticated (for its time) flight control system.

I will soon have the VKB Gunfighter IV with a 100mm extension. I guess hard centering cams with the maximum spring strength would be a starting point?

 

[Raven (Elysian Angel)]

Let's wait for Heatblur to actually release the thing, shall we?  
Perhaps they will compensate for certain behaviour, perhaps they won't and we will need to adjust if our home setup doesn't quite match the feeling we want to replicate.

[Phantom12]

Havent watched the whole vid above yet so forgive me if im misunderstanding your question but.... in my experience attempts to emulate/imitate stick force effects on normal joysticks tend to be awkward at best. In my opinion/experience its better to learn to adapt and fly without the missing feedback than add some sort of complicated and probably unintuitive compensation. In the case of the F-4 the obvious examples that spring to my mind would be the reduction in stick force you get when slowing down from high mach numbers, or when approaching a stall. In either case I think id have better success learning to recognise buffeting at stall onset, or whatever other visual/audio/handling cues I need, than having some sort of system which is constantly moving my virtual stick around even though I never moved my joystick IRL. It will take longer to learn these things on a non FFB stick than on one with but it is doable with a bit of practice.

If you need examples its been attempted on the Mirage F1 (where I prefer it off), and there was an old (worse) implementation which was replaced with a newer, slightly less awkward, version on the Me 109 K-4 for dealing with high stick force situations.

 

In any case Im confident whatever options HB gives us will have been carefully considered and tested, and will probably be good enough to satisfy most of us.

[Bremspropeller]

Springs will only give you a fixed force-ratio, which is not what the actual aircraft does, as it also uses the bobweights for g-dependant stick forces. Then there's the q-feel system, that's also a dynamic relation between stick-force and dynamic pressure. Some jets (e.g. Mirage) don't use the bobweights, but viscous dampers, which are working a little different altogether.

The sim-based implementation of the Mirage works closer to reality than any homecockpit setup. You'll just have to think of your joystick-deflection as a force vector onto the stick in the aircraft, not a stick-position. The used force-rate should give you a distinct output through the viscous damper:

High rate => high damping / low rate => low daming.

[SickSidewinder9]

Was just watching this video and gonna ask a similar question.  Too bad FFB sticks never really went anywhere major.  This would be perfect for it.