Bill Galbraith wrote: > A brief review: Helicopter controls (longitudinal cyclic, lateral > cyclic, collective, and pedals) will all be trimmed at different > locations for different conditions of airspeed, altitude, weight, > center of gravity, and pilot weight. Joysticks and spring-and-pot > control systems for simulators can't replicate this, thus making > simulation of helicopters in a low-cost flight simulator difficult.
But you can sorta-kinda fake this by using the joystick input to drive stick force, and not position. Even worse, IMHO, is the lack of precision of PC throttles when used as a collective. A high performance helicopter's rotor might be able to produce an acceleration in the range of -1G to 2G, but a typical joystick only has about 6-7 bits of precision, so let's say it can represent 100 discrete values* -- that means that the collective can represent any given vertical acceleration (say, 1G -- a hover) to within +/-0.03G, which is a rather high acceleration. Definitely not a "hover". * In practice it's even worse, as most sticks have jumps and skips in their response curve. Those "100 points" aren't even spread evenly across the input range. Andy _______________________________________________ Flightgear-users mailing list [email protected] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-users 2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d
