Different flight controls for rockets and planes

[michelcolman]

When you fly a rocket using a joystick, it makes sense to have the two primary axes of the joystick coupled to pitch and yaw, and the twisting axis of the joystick coupled to roll. However, when you're flying a plane, you want the primary axes to be pitch and roll, with the rarely used yaw coupled to the twisting axis.

Right now it takes a trip to the main menu settings menu to change these settings (it's not even available from the in game settings menu). Ideally we should be able to quickly switch between the two ways of controlling craft.

The main menu input settings menu already has different settings for "flight" and "vessel", maybe you can make that "plane", "rocket", "rover"? And it would be great if we could pick the control setup from a context menu on the part. Airplane cockpits would default to "plane", but if for some reason you stick one onto a rocket, you could switch the controls to "rocket" by right-clicking on it and choosing that option.

Or, as an alternative, a quick toggle switch to swap roll and yaw? (which is remembered for each individual cockpit/pod so you don't have to toggle every time you switch to a craft of the other type)

[FlyingPete]

The trouble with a joystick is as you describe- if you assign pitch+yaw to the stick it goes against learned behaviour from playing flight sims. Assigning it to pitch+roll makes for clumsy control of rockets and maneuvering in space.

I make use of a PS3-type game pad rather than a joystick, with dual analog sticks. I set it up with the left stick as pitch+yaw, the right stick as translate forward/back+roll, and the D-pad as translate up/down+left/right. This works well enough with planes and is more intuitive with rockets.

When you're docking, you have the ability to first set the alignment with the left stick, then use the D-pad and right stick to complete the docking. You have the roll axis available at all times for docking situations where this matters. I also double up the D-pad for rover wheel control. This keeps it separate from the reaction wheels and you can just disengage RCS when you're driving around.

 

If you need to access the keyboard controls (to switch to the map, activate action groups in flight etc) you can fly one-handed with your left hand for a time without losing control.

 

 

[razark]

I find having the rocket set the same as the plane makes more sense.  The rocket follows the movement of the stick.

If I push the stick forward, the nose moves down.  Pull back, nose up.
Move stick right, the ship rolls right.  Twist the stick left, the ship twists left.

 

[Val]

There's a mod that does this, by @zengei. I use it all the time.