I’ve started to play around with some full arc detent rails for Virpils latest throttle.
The throttle comes with a bunch of different detent solutions. All but one of the detents are split into forward and aft, each adjustable by a few degrees. The center detent is the only one that is secured by two screws and that made me think of making detent rails that cover the entire arc, integrating the forward and aft detents into one solution.
Here’s my first attempt.
It has got a firm idle/shut off detent that requires the finger lifts to be activated to pull the throttles aft. The throttles can be pushed forward into start position.
The afterburner detent is designed to make a noticeable stop, but allow for push through activation. I also added some notches for afterburner staging, just to see if that’s something I want or not.
I could fine tune the position of the detents to suit different aircraft.
Suggestions are welcome, as always!
As with all your work, it is so professionally done it is nearly impossible to see where the Virpril stops and your adding starts…perhaps if you added a few rubber bands and duct tape instead to your work (as I often do) we could more readily see the differences.
On a series note: Regarding the AB detents. Is that simply a factor of some careful calibration to make the detent “soft” for is there some elastic deformation in the detent piece?
Speaking of detents for the TM-50 CM3 throttle, I’ve had a hankering lately to fly some rotorcraft, but pondering which detents, if any, would work best. Pulling for powah dictates these dichotomies of course.
Seriously addictive. @Victork2 has a lot to answer for when he gave me the Huey module. It has absorbed lockdown/shielding and I have not even looked at the F18 this year. I commend ‘Black Angels’ on ‘Low Level Heaven servers’. Being a German site is not an issue. They change to English.
Grizzly is a real world QHI and CPL(H),and is happy giving you 1 to1 tuition to enable you to cope with 12 ship or more formations in multiplayer. @Cib has also been brilliant reducing my various rotary issues.
Virpil sent me a beta version of the new VPC Controller software, so I could test the new detent features.
Now we have a ‘hardware’ value and a ‘software’ value, of all axes. This means that we can set up zones around the detents that will be hidden from windows. This is very useful for setting up an idle/cut off detent, and afterburner detents. Think of the idle detent, for instance. You want to move the throttle handle back until the deten stop. Here the axis value should be 0%. Then you pull the finger lifts and pull the throttle back, behind 0%. This wasn’t possible earlier. Not if you wanted to register a button activation as you pulled the throttle into cut off, at least. Now you can. Conversely, the Afterburner detent should stop your throttle handle from entering the AB range, at 100% military power, or ‘dry thrust’. Then you pull the finger lifts and move the handle forward of the AB detent. But depending on how big the detent is, you may move the handle quite a bit into the AB range and thereby lose the ability of modulating the lower AB range. Now you can set up a dead zone at the beginning and end of the detent. As you will see in the video I made, the axis value reaches 70% at the detent. When I move the throttle handle past the detent, it’s still 70%. You can set this value to be what ever you want, giving you the ability to have the AB to engage just past the detent, without any loss of axes range.
When you set up your axis to button definitions, you can choose between hardware or logical axis values, which will allow for button activations within the ‘deadzone’ areas, like below the 0% software value.
So now I don’t have to get creative in the DCS controller mapping. Everything can be set up in the VPC software and flashed to the throttle!
