Ok Jeff, here is the help I can give.
First off, it feels "mushy" compared to what? Airwarrior? FighterAce? Warbirds? SimBOB?
Now on sticksetup. I will skip deadbands and dampeners since you indicate you understand that part.
There are two square windows with lines on the left hand side.
The upper one is like an "Ocilloscope". Move your controls, and you should see the line move. What you don't want to see is a "spiky" line. This indicates that the control you just moved is spiking and not working correctly. You also want to make sure that if you move the joystick as far as it will go, that the line on the "scope" moves all the way to the edge of the screen.
The lower one (window), is a control response curve, which is set by the sliders on the right labeled 0, 10, 20, etc. to 90.
Think of the 0 (zero) slider as being the first 10% of joystick movement, the 90 slider is last 10% of joystick movement, or as far as it will go. If you move the 0 slider up very high (top of screen) that means that if you move the stick a very little bit, you will get alot of control response. If you keep that first slider low, you will get little control response from moving the stick that first 10% of its movement.
Now you will have a seperate setup for each control direction in pitch, roll, and yaw. And how you set them up depends on how you like them and flying style.
Personally, I fly Energy Tactics, so I don't like to pull hard G's. So I setup my controls to give my very little response initially, but full control force at the full joystick movement.
Here is how I set them up.
Pitch: pitch is the nose up and down. And since I keep my speed high in most cases (easy to blackout), I want a slow even response on this axis. So I set the 0 slider low about 1/10 of way up, 10 slider at 2/10, 20 slider 3/10, etc.
Roll: this moves your wings up and down. Now rolling doesn't make you black out, and its critical to quick maneuvers. So I want a high response on this axis at all times. So I set the 0 slider to 7/10 of the way up,10 slider to 8/10, 20 slider to 9/10, and 30-90 sliders to all the way up (10/10).
Yaw: this moves your tail side to side. Now I personally have to keep my yaw response set low or I get a rubber band effect. So I setup a flat response curve and keep even the maximum throw set to a low control force. So I set the 0 slider to 10/100, 10 slider at 15/100's, etc up to 90 slider at 55/100's of its height (55% of height).
Now when you go to setup your stick, do it in one control direction at a time. Setup pitch, and then fly offline for a while. Readjust pitch, fly some more. Do this until pitch feels right.
Then repeat cycle for Roll and Yaw.
Just one dumb engineer to another.
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**MOL**, Men of Leisure,
"Real Men fly Radials, Nancy Boys fly Spitfires"
