HOSAS throttle setup

[Pville_Piper]

I thought I would drop a note about this, others may not be aware of this. In the control bindings under thrust, there is a forward and reverse thrust axis and in the throttle settings there's a forward and reverse throttle axis. I wondered why they had both and what would happen if both were programmed and used.

So today, while playing around with my new VKB Omni throttle I did just that. I set up the rotary throttle a forward throttle only and the sticks pitch axis as a full range throttle. The pitch axis works as expected, place it in the middle of the range, 0 speed, push all the way forward and you get +100% thrust and pull all the way back you get -100% thrust or full reverse throttle. The interesting part is when you set the rotary throttle to 50%. The reverse acts like it always does, but the forward will only increase the ships speed when it goes above the setting of the rotary throttle and will only decrease the speed until it goes below the setting of the rotary throttle.

For instance, set the rotary to 50% with the pitch axis at zero and you fly at fifty percent. Increase the pitch to 40% thrust, no change in speed. Set the pitch to 75% and you will now be at 75%. Set the pitch to zero and the speed is now 50%. Set the throttle to -25% and you will decelerate and begin moving at 25% speed in reverse. You can never hit 0% as long as the rotary axis is above 0%.

The cool thing is, you can set the rotary to 50%, which is the middle of the blue zone and fly at best maneuvering speed, but if you need to catch up to the enemy, retreat from them or maintain a distance, you can do this quite easily with the throttle setup this way. When you zero the stick, you are in the middle of the blue zone. Seems to work really well when using a HOSAS. It's a real blast to fly that way.

 

[Willyum-71]

Hey, that's pretty cool... took me a minute to understand. Normally I left the Thrust 'un-assigned' and just had the 'throttle' assigned to the Omni forward and backward (Y-axis). So I just now assigned 'throttle' to that rotary you mentioned on my right EVO (I'm currently using the left Omni rotary for other stuff) and switched the Omni forward backward to 'Thrust' instead of the 'Throttle'... Nice to have that extra control. I currently have 0%, 25%, 50%, 75% and 100% assigned as buttons.... but as soon as I touch the Omni FWD/BWD it overrides the 50% button and springs back to zero position of Omni stick resting position.... there are definitely times where a resting 50% or 25% would have come in handy... Thank you, this is Awesome!!!

Here's my big question, I'm in the Black this week (deep enough where Every jump is a undiscovered system... so it will be a while before I get to test if using 'Thrust' instead of 'Throttle' performs any differently in a high intensity situation?

 

[Willyum-71]

OK so... thrusters assigned to my Omni stick resulted in not having any throttle control in supercruise... where as Throttle works in both supercruise and regular air/space flight. I liked the idea of having 1 spring loaded zero-return throttle and 1 standard positional so I could use it for slow speed scanning for exobiology and having my other hand on the mouse for head-tracking looking side to side.... can't use mouse head tracking if both hands have to constantly control both sticks.... My other use for this setup would be in camera mode. I'll try this for a little while to see if I get used to separate controls for each type of flight... it might grow on me considering there is no reverse in supercruise anyway not to mention I pretty much only use the 0% 75% and 100% buttons in SC... Oh and 50% when getting interdicted for best maneuverability.

 

[Pville_Piper]

So, full disclosure... I use a head tracking device and voice attack so I can very easily look around using the head tracker and set speeds using voice commands. The biggest issue is to not get distracted and overshoot my mark. The other issue was attempting to land with the throttle (center rotary axis on the base) above 0%, doesn't seem to work well!

What I did last night was to put the spring back in and loosened the dampers and run the throttle full time and I use the stick as forward and reverse thrusters. I drop the throttle to 0 anytime I drop from super cruise at a station or out of glide to keep me from forgetting about it. It definitely is a different way to fly, but I'm committed to the HOSAS way of flying.

The cool thing is using this setup to scoop things, you set the throttle to just below the maximum speed you can scoop at and use the thrusters to accelerate to close the gap and zero the thrusters to slow down and scoop. It's actually very precise once you get the feel for how fast your ship slows down and once you get the hang of it, you can scoop pretty quickly. I'm really looking forward to taking out my Keelie and doing a bit of deep core mining, I only take prospectors with me and manually scoop the bits. This is really a fun way to mine, and the Keelie holds a decent amount of cargo to make it profitable as well.

For the SRV, I use the sick as a full range throttle because you are quite often modulating speeds and it works quite well. I can tell you that my driving is much improved, and more enjoyable. I'm tinkering with the idea of using the X axis on the omni as the steering, but the VKB rudder pedals work so well for this that I'm hesitant.