VKB Gladiator EVO Pro + STECS Standard… honestly, what a difference
So I’ve finally moved over to a VKB Gladiator and STECS throttle from my old Saitek X56 Rhino HOTAS and… oh my god.
I genuinely wasn’t expecting the difference to be this big.
I paid decent money for the X56 a couple of years ago and, to be fair to it, it’s done alright. I never really thought there was anything massively wrong with it. It was just my HOTAS and I got on with it.
But the VKB stuff is on another planet.
I’ve been flight simming since Flight Simulator 98. Pretty sure I’ve owned basically every MS Flight Simulator since then, plus dabbled in X-Plane and P3D over the years, so I’m comfortably 20+ years into this hobby!
And genuinely, this is probably one of the biggest upgrades I’ve ever made.
The precision is just ridiculous. For years I’ve wondered why my landings were always a bit hit and miss, why I struggled to hold a really smooth approach, why flaring sometimes felt like complete guesswork etc.
Turns out a massive part of it was apparently the controls - even though I never pointed the blame at them.
It’s honestly turned the sim on its head for me. Tiny corrections actually feel like tiny corrections. Flare inputs feel predictable. Throttle movements feel deliberate rather than vaguely asking the aircraft to do something and hoping for the best.
I’m absolutely blown away by it.
My only complaint so far is I really wish Asobo/Microsoft would just include some decent default VKB profiles in MSFS 2024. Getting the STECS throttle properly going from 0-100% was a bit of a haphazard trial-and-error job at first. I figured it out pretty quickly, but I can imagine somebody completely new to flight simming/controller setup having absolutely no idea what they’re supposed to do.
But once it’s set up… wow.
If you’re currently using an X56 and sitting there wondering whether the VKB upgrade is actually going to make much difference, I can only speak for myself, but it’s been night and day.
All these years flight simming and I feel like I’ve suddenly discovered what the controls were supposed to feel like.