New HOTAS advice

[Voyager]

Originally Posted by fuzzychickens

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CH is really the best choice unless you prefer style over substance. CH has no style - but it gets the job done better than anything else. It's accurate (more so than everything else) and reliable (the opposite of the cougar).
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They may have no style, but they feel so nice. CH makes their parts out of a different plastic that any other joystick maker I've bought from. I'm not sure what it is, but they stay comfortable to hold even through extremely heavy usage. I think it also helps that they have a micro-roughened surface. Not course, you can't see it in the pictures, but not smooth either; just right. Attracts dust like a magnet, though.

Their software is good. It looks like something out of Windows 3.1, but it is highly function, and will do anything you need it to. For a while I had a mapping which mapped the mini-stick on the throttle to the arrows keys, complete with a dead zone mapping that left a wide center dead zone, such that just bumping it wouldn't do anything, but if I pushed it past 60% deflection, then the key press would be activated. I was using it to control thrust vectoring in a SciFi game I was playing at the time.

Some things that I'm still not fully sold on at the shape and button layout of the Fighterstick. It's encrusted in tilt switches, but I find that most of them, particularly on the head of the stick, aren't easy to reach, and generally, by the time I've mapped 16 different functions to something, I've forgotten what most of them were, and I find it to be a bit top heavy myself. It may just be that I spent most of my time using MS Sidewinders before I moved to CH, so your mileage may vary.

Overall, I'd still say they are as good as you're going to get, without getting one that's custom built, and I've used a lot of joysticks over the years.

Harry Voyager