As is known, rudder is quite an important component to flying aircraft without yaw damping and whatnot. Coordinated flight, better nose control for aiming and so on.
Default rudder gives max deflection which causes enormous kicks and barely helps with either coordinated turns and aiming.
Until now, with some success, I’ve worked on experimenting with roll/yaw mixing for my mouse joystick to try and find settings for my plane that work well for my needs. However, I’ve been wanting more clear control of my rudder without spending money on equipment so thought: What about relative control with “reset axis” bound to easy to press buttons (alt q and alt e alike).
It seems to work decently enough in flight test for getting my turns coordinated in the a6m3 and ki-43 iii, however I’m yet to bring it to a live battle for testing.
To avoid potential many, many, many failed matches as I experiment to find optimal settings, I’d like to ask the community -
Did anyone else try to get better rudder control using relative axes? If yes, what are your settings and what kind of planes do you use them with?
In KSP FAR, I’d swap between precision & rough controls and alt+Q/E allowed me to avoid having to tap Q/E. It’s kind of what I want to reproduce.
Edit: Got a reply on Reddit with someone’s cfg and after testing it, it works like a charm. It even allows doing forward slip landings and other cross-control maneuvers.
Made some modifications and arrived at these control modifications of the original. The key starting point is nonlinearity 2, 100% sensitivity and 5% step with 0% yaw mixing.
Well, I’ve described it in the spoiler with my controls (screenshot of my set-up)! Relative axis enabled, non-linearity at 2.0, 100% sensitivity, 5% step. Remove yaw mixing from mousejoy.
It’s not perfect. In KSP you could hot-swap your control scheme between rough (press once and full deflection) and fine (press once and it’s a minor deflection) by just pressing caps clock, and you could hot swap between relative control (ie press alt + button and it stays pressed down allowing for precise deflection during maneuvers) and binary (full deflection/vs neutral)
In Warthunder, only thing possible is ONLY hard/rough (sensitivity and step setting) and relative/binary without the ability to swap on demand. However, non-linearity does kind of give you an ability to toggle hard/rough - tap q repeatedly and you only move your rudder by like minor amounts per input - useful for take off and landing and shooting. Hard-press it and it goes full deflection faster than you’d expect - useful for spin recovery.
So far (only test flight shooting of those biplanes), it works as I expected. Only frustration is no indication of how much yaw I applied unless I look down at the pilot’s feet or the flight coordinator, but that’s something practice will resolve and press “2” resets it if in doubt.
It seems to depend on your plane having tested japs today.
With P-51 cannon mustang, it felt almost too subtle - like, needed pretty heavy inputs to keep coordinated. With A6M3, it was too big and reduced it to like 2% increment as a single tap with 5% shifted me from barely slipping to barely skidding. 2% it got coordinated
Was responding to a thread about mousejoy issues on reddit and as I was searching for a good video to demonstrate things I had an epiphany due to the video’s explanation of what “Yaw sensitivity” means: It acts as a damper on your inputs for how fast things deflect. This is very good for normal keyboard controls to be set low as it dampens the 0-100 jump.
However, with this control control scheme (relative rudder), this is not needed. We have precise control over the deflection of the rudder by tapping Q/E and it staying at that deflection like if we had feet on pedal.
Having 0% yaw sensitivity makes the rudder lag behind a lot. This meant my Bf109 takeoffs were super… weird and oscillating. I’d deflect rudder to compensate, but it took a long time to deflect and so by the time it reached the desired point, it over-compensated… so now I overcompensated with opposite rudder and cue wobbly take off.
I set it to 100% and kept my Q/E at 1.5 non-linearity, 3% step and… taking off in a BF109 was as easy as an A6M3!
I recommend trying out 100% sensitivity for anyone else that tries to mimic pedals with Q/E relative input.
