What I'm saying is that for X lbs of force on the stick in the simulated bird, there is A times X degrees of motion of the joystick, where A is a constant.
And assuming one hasn't monkeyed with the joystick axis scalings, and one is using a stick with a linear spring, this means that for X lbs of sim. stick force there is K times A times X lbs of force on the joystick, K being a spring constant.
So by sensing how much force you are putting on the springs in the joystick, you can indeed get a feel for how much control force you are putting on the controls in the physical model of the plane. The forces are just scaled down a lot from those on the real plane. Anyways this mechanism allows one to learn how much joystick force will breaka da plane.
And stick travel is part of "feel" too. In real life when you move the stick back 2 inches, it's always going to deflect the elevator a certain amount (assuming a rigid mechanical linkage without any electronics or gizmos to change the ratios). Your body has a very good ability to sense how far you have moved the joints in your hand and arm. So with experience you can get a feel for how many degrees of elevator you are using by learning how much movement your hand/arm has made.
But in AH, moving the stick 2 inches gives you a different elevator deflection depending on how fast you are going! So at each IAS level, you have to learn a different relationship between hand motion and elevator motion.
This is where the sound comes in. If you have a sound (wind or engine or whatever) that you can use to accurately judge the IAS, then you it makes it easier to learn the relationship between stick deflections and simulated elevator deflections.
This may sound kind of overcomplicated, but it's something I've been thinking about for a couple of years of playing Warbirds - how the heck do we learn to fly the virtual planes pretty darn close to the limit in the absence of most of the stimuli that a real pilot gets. These things aren't learned consciously, they are just "picked up" depending on how sensitive one is to machinery, sounds, etc.
I think I started thinking about it with respect to racing games like Grand Prix Legends, because I have some competitive driving experience to compare with (as compared to zero flying experience). In the driving games there is usually a variable steering ratio, which like AH gives a roughly linear relationship between control forces on the input device and control forces on the simulated car. There are exaggerated tire skid sounds to convey slip angle information (kind of like AoA) and there are engine RPM, road noise, and wind noise to convey vehicle speed information.
