r/hotas

Hello everyone

I've recently heard a lot of bad things about WinWing's customer service and quality.

I'm interested in some actual customer stories regarding these issues.

I'm looking into buying the Orion2 HOTAS StrikeAce E/EX here in the EU, if anyone has any specifics on that.

Thank you.

Longtime player whose stick has started leaning after a while which needs me replugging it to fix. Looking to replace it. My options rn are this or the honeycomb foxtrot but that's in short supply

Until now all my flight / space games I played with Mouse and Keyboard. I recently bought a vkb gladiator stick and it feels so much better. However, as expected, my skill at aiming various guns in games had gone down considerably. I will probably get better with practice but I wonder if it is even possible to ever be as good as using a mouse for gun kills, or do I just need to accept that I will just be worse now in dogfights.

Just wanted to hear your opinions about it.

For those wondering, right now I mainly play Nuclear Option and Infinity Battlescape

Hi guys I'm trying to figure out if the thrustmaster T16000m throttle is worth getting or if I should get a different throttle to pair with my vkb gladiator

Hi everyone!

I’m looking to buy my first HOTAS, but I’m not really sure which one to go for, so I’d love to hear your recommendations and experiences.

I’m mainly looking for something that:

-isn’t too expensive — I’d like to keep the price reasonably affordable

-has good build quality and is reliable

-is comfortable and enjoyable to use for longer gaming sessions

-works properly on Windows 11

-is as compatible as possible with IL-2 Sturmovik: Great Battles and IL-2 Sturmovik: Korea

I’m not necessarily looking for the absolute cheapest option, but I also don’t want to spend a huge amount of money on my first HOTAS. I’d rather find something with a good price-to-quality ratio that I can enjoy for a long time.

So, what would you recommend for a beginner? Are there any particular HOTAS setups or models I should look at, and are there any that I should avoid?

Thanks in advance for any recommendations!

Hello lovely people of this subreddit, I have been using the good old logitech 3d stick until now for my flights and recently got into the moza ecosystem and now I have a full racing setup including a foldable race cockpit. I want to get a proper upgrade for my flight sims as well and have been considering the Moza AB6 as the idea of FFB sounds very nice and I would be able to mount it on my current racing cockpit easily by just switching the steering wheel into the mount for AB6 and use the pedals as rudder.

I would love to know if there are any other recommendations in that price range or if anyone owns it what they think of the AB6, I have considered gladiator but found out they are not available in my region so I would really appreciate some suggestions before I make a purchase, thank you ahead of time!

New Lurker and entry enthusiast into the HOTAS neighborhood, recently (yesterday) got my first joystick (NXT Gladiator) in the hopes of learning how to fly helicopters.

Got probably about ~50 hours in via MnK to learn concepts, but realize that I’ll also have to spend time translating that to the HOTAS system.

Looking at potentially acquiring these pedals in the not so distant future and have a couple of random questions.

Games: Arma series, maybe Squad, definitely Wardogs.

1.) I am worried about breaking the pedals under normal use conditions because I am kind of a “bull in the fine china shop” kind of guy (not maliciously).

2.) what… footwear is recommended for these. I usually like wearing tennis shoes or slip on crocs around the house, normally that’s what I would wear when I’m on my computer.

3.) is that the natural progression joystick, pedals, throttle for my use case?

Anyways, thanks for your time!

So i just picked up a Gladiator NXT EVO SCG to replace my Thrustmaster, which had drift issues. I'm loving the joystick, but the the yaw feels sluggish. Like i have the joystick twisted halway to its max rotation, and only then does my ship starts to move.

Because of the drift on my previous joystick, the yaw always felt very touchy. So im not sure if this is how its supposed to be, or if there is a setting in game i should adjust, or on the joystick itslef.

I've calibrated the joystick several times.

Made the choice to upgrade my broken Saiktek X56 to a NXT Evo Premium and I am trying to find the best vendor for delivery in Canadia.

Are there any other dealers other than VIPPilot that delivers in Canada? I have the option of buying in the US and shipping to a mailbox center and picking it up, but it doesn't seem with the US price and tariffs and other nonsense that is makes sense to bother with the effort.

I've been trying to diagnose the ghost button inputs on my Logitech X56, mostly happening on the throttle side, since I picked it up a couple of weeks ago. Did all the usual stuff you read about this HOTAS, powered hub, different cables, etc. I was genuinely about to start pricing out a replacement. Bottom line is, the X56 does not play well with USB hub's, at all.

Important nuance I got wrong at first, so I'll lead with it: it is not "docks bad, direct good." My Thunderbolt dock is completely clean. What matters is whether there's an actual USB hub between the device and the machine.

I'm on a Mac so there's zero Logitech software, which is what kicked this whole thing off. Ended up writing a CLI to talk to it over HID, then a monitor to log the raw input reports so I could see what was actually happening.

What the ghost inputs actually are

It's single-poll frame corruption. One 8ms USB frame comes through garbage and the next one is fine. Specifically:

• Whole BYTES of the report flipping to 0xFF, so you get 8 consecutive buttons "pressed" for 8ms
• Axis values jumping half their range in one poll and snapping back on the next. 460 out of 1023, in 8ms. Nobody moves a lever that fast
• Rotaries I wasn't touching showing big excursions and instantly returning

The byte alignment is the giveaway. Switches don't fail in groups of exactly 8, and a pot physically cannot set button bits. Once I caught an axis and three buttons corrupting in the same frame and recovering in the same frame, mechanical was off the table.

The data

Same throttle, same 60 second test, same routine (sweep idle -> max -> idle repeatedly). "Glitches per range" is normalized by how far I actually moved the lever, otherwise you're just measuring how much you fidgeted that minute.

Clean:

• USB A->C adapter into a built-in port - 0.00 per range, biggest single-poll jump 18. Three runs, 42 ranges of travel, not one corruption event
• Thunderbolt dock with its own xHCI controller - 0.00 per range, biggest jump 22, 18 ranges of travel

Broken:

• Dock built on 3 cascaded single-TT hubs - 0.90 per range, biggest jump 262
• Powered hub, throttle the ONLY thing plugged into it - 0.11 per range, biggest jump 460. The 0.11 is too low, my detector was undercounting on that run. The 460 jump is the real story
• Realtek RTS5411, multi-TT, single hop - 0.50 per range, biggest jump 389

For reference a genuinely fast lever movement tops out around 18-22 units per poll. Anything in the hundreds isn't physics.

Stuff I ruled out

• LEDs. I read repeated concerns about how the lighting was drawing enough current to cause this. Ran a controlled A/B, on vs off, alternating with a settling gap. No effect. Got more glitches with them off in one round, which is just noise, but it pretty much killed that theory
• Bus contention. The powered hub run had literally nothing else plugged into it
• Cascade depth. The Realtek was a single hop
• Single-TT vs multi-TT. This is the one that surprised me. My hub-based dock is 3x cascaded Genesys GL852, all single-TT (bDeviceProtocol = 1), so I figured a multi-TT hub was the fix. Tested one. Still broken. So it is NOT transaction translator count, which was my entire working theory going in
• Power. My clean runs included a PD passthrough charging the Mac at 85W over the same USB-C connector carrying the throttle data. Zero glitches. Meanwhile the Realtek hub corrupted frames with no power running through it at all

Why a Thunderbolt dock is fine but a USB hub isn't

This is the bit that took me longest to work out. A proper Thunderbolt dock presents its own xHCI controller over PCIe. Its USB-A ports are native root ports of that controller, electrically the same as ports on your machine. A USB hub is a completely different animal, and plenty of things marketed as "docks" are just hubs in a nicer shell. Two of the "hubs" I tested were a Steam Deck dock and an Anker usb-C dock.

My guess at the mechanism (someone who actually knows USB, please correct me)

The X56 is a full speed 12 Mbps device. Any USB 2.0 hub has to carry full speed traffic using split transactions, SSPLIT/CSPLIT, brokered by that hub's transaction translator. A root port doesn't use split transactions at all.

So my read is the X56 firmware is marginal at split transaction handling and it doesn't matter how good your hub is. Device-side problem that only ever shows up behind a hub.

That would also explain how "mine's been flawless for five years" and "mine ghosts constantly" can both be true, depending purely on how people have it plugged in.

How to check what you've actually got

Don't trust the product page, check the tree.

• Mac: ioreg -p IOUSB -w 0 - if your stick shows up directly under something like AppleT6000USBXHCI or AppleUSBXHCIFL1100, you're on a root port. If there's a USB2.1 Hub in the chain above it, you're behind a hub
• Linux: lsusb -t
• Windows: USB Device Tree Viewer (free), or Device Manager set to "View by connection"

Mine currently reads Root -> AppleUSBXHCIFL1100 -> X-56 Throttle, no hub, clean. My keyboard and mouse read Root -> AppleT6000USBXHCI -> USB2.1 Hub -> USB2.1 Hub -> Keychron, two hubs deep.

Which brings up something worth checking: my keyboard and mouse are the same speed class as the throttle and have been behind that same single-TT chain the whole time. If you get the occasional dropped or doubled keystroke, might be related. I never would have thought to blame the dock for that.

Caveats

n=1, one throttle, macOS. Tooling is Mac specific but the finding should be platform independent since it's happening at the USB layer. Haven't tested the stick half yet.

If anyone on Windows or Linux wants to try this, I'd be curious. Especially if you have a USB hub that doesn't do this, because that would blow a hole in the theory.

Happy to stick the CLI on GitHub if there's interest. Swift/IOKit, does LED control plus the axis monitor that generated all these numbers.

Hello everyone,

I have a t16000m joystick and I'm looking for a throttle. The t16000m throttle companion is out of question because I would like a throttle with at least two axis for when I fly planes with two engines.

I looked into other options and saw someone in my area selling a TCA Airbus throttle for 60 bucks. Problem is, will this throttle also work for single engine planes on combat sims like IL2? I'm worried the throttle might be too stiff for fluent movements

Hello!

I just ordered the Virpil Aeromax stick with the little throttle guy that bolts onto the side. After a lot of research, I decided to go for this guy ala buy once cry once. It seems to be a pretty decent product and I've heard a lot of people recommend Virpil (among others).

I typically fly helicopters in games like Battlebit, Battlefield, GTA, and now Wardogs (super excited).

I've been reading that foot pedals are pretty important for helicopter piloting? I know that the stick I purchased has a twist axis, which is also lockable if I decide to grab some pedals down the road.

I must express my profound ignorance as I am just getting into the space but I just wanted to hear from more experienced folks in the hobby about flying helicopters with these sort of peripherals.

Thanks so much for your thoughts, whoever stops by!

TLDR; Can I fly pretty happily for a while using twist axis for anti-torque while I see if I want to delve deeper and grab a set of pedals?

I've found a love for piloting rotary craft in various games (Arma 3, Nuclear Option, X-Plane 11 and 12) and found that the best control for these craft is removing the centering springs. The problem is I also like to play Spaceflight Sims (Elite Dangerous, Spaceborne II, Evochron Legacy 1 & 2, X4, etc) as well as play fixed wing aircraft in the other games I've already mentioned as well, plus DCS World.

I don't want to continuously go back and forth adding and removing the #10 centering springs every time I change craft. For one, it's additional ware and tear on the hooks that I'd be concerned about breaking after prolonged use. For another it's not practical, especially for games like NO and Arma where I may have to use multiple airframe types within the same session.

I actually prefer not having any centering force, but is there a way to create a center detent where I can feel that the stick is at dead center without having to look for visual clues within game to see that I'm drifting/spinning ever so slightly?

Just wondering, should I get a 100 mm, 200mm or both? What are your thoughts? I plan on playing IL-2 Sturmokovic, IL-2 Korea, DCS with fighter planes, and I also want to do apache helicopter. What do you guys think? Thank you guys for your expert advice!