(Sorry about the weird title; starting recently, this forum does very weird things whenever I use "weird" keys like, oh, arrows or backspace—scrolling around and jumping fields and editing things off-screen....)
I've seen mention of some players using the Saitek x52 Pro trim wheels for thrust—the (E) wheel for lateral thrust, the (i) for up/down thrust. I've always just used a hat for this, but lately I've been doing more high-gee planetary missions, so being able to "trim" thrust to counteract gravity seemed like a good idea, so I made those bindings.
At first it seemed like it was so great I couldn't believe it wasn't set up that way by default, but then I discovered two big problems:
I looked for posts on this and the only one I found that talked about the mechanics of it (rather than simply saying it was a good use of the wheels and a good way to do thrust) was incomprehensible—it talked about using "bands" in the Saitek software, which I don't understand at all—I played with it a bit, but I can't see how I could use this feature to get what I want, which is a large amount of "play" to give me fine-grained control in the low-thrust range, and less as the thrust input increases. (It was also from 2014, so I don't know how much actual play experience the discussion was based on anyway.)
For those of you using the wheels for thrust, do you just not ever use delicate thrust? Do you just digital taps on a different control for slower movements and the wheels only for big ones? Or is there some other solution here?
Appreciate any help, commanders! o7
I've seen mention of some players using the Saitek x52 Pro trim wheels for thrust—the (E) wheel for lateral thrust, the (i) for up/down thrust. I've always just used a hat for this, but lately I've been doing more high-gee planetary missions, so being able to "trim" thrust to counteract gravity seemed like a good idea, so I made those bindings.
At first it seemed like it was so great I couldn't believe it wasn't set up that way by default, but then I discovered two big problems:
- At center detent, both wheels jitter like crazy, which is crazy annoying since it gives you tiny puffs of thrust all the time—no problem, that's what dead zones are for, and they barely jitter any amount at all, they just do it a lot
- Once you've set a dead zone, it's way too sensitive. I can't thrust anything less than 5 m/s without going to zero, and beyond that it's hard to hit a speed within 5 m/s or so—when I very rarely use non-counter-gee thrust over 15 m/s except in takeoff and combat, and then it's usually near-full
I looked for posts on this and the only one I found that talked about the mechanics of it (rather than simply saying it was a good use of the wheels and a good way to do thrust) was incomprehensible—it talked about using "bands" in the Saitek software, which I don't understand at all—I played with it a bit, but I can't see how I could use this feature to get what I want, which is a large amount of "play" to give me fine-grained control in the low-thrust range, and less as the thrust input increases. (It was also from 2014, so I don't know how much actual play experience the discussion was based on anyway.)
For those of you using the wheels for thrust, do you just not ever use delicate thrust? Do you just digital taps on a different control for slower movements and the wheels only for big ones? Or is there some other solution here?
Appreciate any help, commanders! o7
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