Haldir

Hello Pete. Thanks for your quick reply! No, unfortunately elevator trim doesn't actually do anything on any helicopter. It seems to be instantly disconnected by the 'helo' flight model. I've even gone so far as to try to add elevator surfaces and trim controls into the aircraft .cfg and .air files (with huge surface areas and insane ranges of movement) of the default bell 206 and the flight model completely ignores their existence. Also I did try your suggestion prior to my post here but failed to mention it, sorry. I used your new facilities to disconnect the stick's Y axis from the sim, and have the joystick send ever increasing or decreasing amounts of up or down elevator, based on how far you've moved the stick, and it does work, but if you get the helicopter into any kind of extreme attitude by accident, wow, its a pretty deadly outcome. :) The helicopter flight model, if you can call it that, in the game Battlefield 2 does pretty much the same thing, as it was designed to be flown with a keyboard or mouse more than a joystick. If recalibration in flight isn't possible, then is there any way to have fsuipc add or subract a persistent but user controlled value to the post calibration position of the stick just before it gets to the sim? Like a way to tell fsuipc "add +500 to the y-axis value at all times" and use buttons to increment or decrement that value on the fly. This would achieve exactly the same trim effect I'm looking for, identical to shifting the stick's dead zone but without messing the calibration up. Again, thanks for your time. Cheers! Mike

Hello Mr. Dowson. First off I'd like to thank you greatly for creating and constantly upgrading FSUIPC. Without it FS9 would be a rather glitchy evil thing to navigate sometimes. Cheers! I have a question about altering joystick calibration in flight. Essentially I'm trying to find a way to trim out the constant control force needed to maintain level flight in any helicopter at any reasonable speed. As you know, fighting the helo's tendency to pitch up during forward flight can become a pretty big pain in the wrist pretty fast, and many helicopters have at least some kind of rudimentary spring system (or better) attached to the cyclic to do just that. Microsoft's omission of any kind of cyclic trim was a pretty big oversight I think. Using the arrow keys in FS, you can basically force the nose down by having it maintain a constant forward cyclic (elevator) pressure, but of course its rough, and the second you touch the joystick on the y-axis, its gone, overwritten by the stick's new value. I've tried several XML based autopilot gauges to try to beat this problem, but I really don't like any of them. I've been able to achieve the effect I'm looking for by setting my null zone parameters in FSUIPC's joystick calibration to something well forward or aft of centre on the y-axis, but this is a more permanent thing, and of course once you decelerate to a hover, you have the opposite problem. I was wondering if there was a way to nudge those centre/null calibration values in increments through an offset or button combination while in flight? Either doing that, or adding or subtracting an incremental value to the post calibration y-axis values would work. Is this even possible? Thanks very much for your time, and again, thanks for creating the most essential of FS addons. I hunted this forum for a fair while but didn't find anything concerning this, so my apologies if this has been asked before. Cheers. Mike