Saitek X-65F Force Sensing thoughts?

What are fellow Simmers thoughts on Force Sensing sticks? By this I mean not Force Feedback like the popular MS stick, but quite literally the stick does not move and instead senses the pressure you put on it to control your Aircraft.

There are mods to do this for the TM Cougar and Warthog stick now too I think?

I bought the Saitek X-65F on day one and and after a while getting used to it, it does work well with the likes of BMS and Jet sims, its much less usable with WW2 and 1 sims I found and and almost useless with any Helicopter flying in any sim at all! I did persevere in FSX Helicopter flying and could just about manage, but it was a pointless exercise when I already had better controllers for that.

MY point is, mine has been sitting here gathering dust and am thinking of selling mine on Ebay, any idea on value anyone? Pretty sure its out of production now and being a bit of a rarity might be actually worth selling there despite Ebay and Paypal fee’s?

Having written that, and despite it not being used for two years + might miss it for the occasional BMS use. So there is this too, decisions decisions.

When I first started using it, my arm and shoulder would be a pulp after an hour. And switching between the different force sensing switches left a lot to be desired. I remember thinking I really botched on this one. To the point were I even though about returning it. But it’s more of a jet fighter stick, and thats were it excels. And once you fine tune those force settings, it’s a very nice stick. It still gives me a sore shoulder. But coming out of a F-15 session, I think is worth it.

I do not, however, like the HOTAS buttons on the stick. I need to leave my grip on the stick to reach the two upper most inputs, even with the little plastic accessory (that raises the hand a bit). So I usually leave those unmapped or have them do stuff that I rarely need to input during a frantic part of the simulation.

The throttle is awesome, I think that one in itself is worth the money. It’s a dual throttle. It comes with two expansion boxes, one comes with buttons and switches that you can set up and sensitivity buttons to change the force input on the fly. The other is just a plate with the values of the different settings for the force sensitivity options, but can be replaced for whatever you would like.

It’s a nice stick to have for fighter jets, but pretty useless for anything else.

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Good reply Sargoth, echos a lot of my thoughts on the device, however if I could only keep one part it would be the dual throttle as it has more rotary’s than the TM Warthog dual Throttle and in many instances this can be very useful … I believe the TM Warthog dual throttle is more natively plug and play than the Saitek dual throttle though, for sure there were lots of problems with Saitek’s X65F dual throttle in the early days with a few sims and DCS included, think they have that worked out now though.

It was the dual throttle of the X65F I found horrible pressure wise, you really had to push and pull very hard on it to get it moving on the lowest friction setting, Saitek said it would loosen up (maybe in about 100 years of usage) and that made precision very hard for me, there was a mod going at the time and I did that and it involved removing part of its internal mechanism, but the friction was still too hard on the Saitek dual throttles IMHO, just ridiculous really I thought.

I did some beta testing for Saitek hardware in the past, never had to sign an NDA so I feel free to say they had some great ideas, but probably never fully fleshed out many of them, and indeed cut a lot of corners in places where a little more time and investment could have seen them today with a much more solid reputation and larger sales base … IMHO, obviously they have done quite well though.

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To answer your question @katana1000s, I just sold mine on Amazon for $400.00 and it went within a week of me posting it.

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I think I’ll sell mine, thanks :slight_smile: