Tuning

The Tuning page is where you set how the stick feels. Every slider writes its new value to the running pipeline on the next 50 Hz tick — so you can fly with Tuning pinned on a second monitor and tweak forces while they're happening.

Figure 1. Tuning page. Profile + Aircraft auto-select card at top, then the master-gain accent card, then collapsible expanders for Forces, Stick feel, Effect gains, Rate damping, Stick drop, Trim, Autopilot follow, and Watchdog. Every slider row carries its label, a short explanation, the slider, a dirty-state reset arrow, and the current value as a percentage.

Master gain

The first card is Master gain, highlighted in brand amber. It is the master volume for force feedback: a percentage from 0% to 100% applied to every output the bridge sends, including the centring spring coefficient, airspeed forces, rumble, buffet, and one-shots. 100% is the designed profile level; lower values soften the whole stick at once. At 0% the bridge sends no force output.

Per-slider help text

Every slider on the page carries a short one-line explanation underneath its label describing what it does in plain terms. All slider values are shown as percentages — there are no raw 0–1 floats in the UI. Read each slider's help line before you touch it; that's where the units, the typical range, and the "what does dialling this up actually feel like" hint live.

Slider groups

Below the Profile + Master gain cards, the rest of the page is grouped into collapsible expanders. Every group remembers whether you had it open. The header tag next to each group name summarises what's inside in a single phrase.

Forces

Base spring + output shaping. Six sliders: spring strength, spring deadband, low-speed spring floor, airspeed-loaded force gain, cruise reference airspeed (where the force model hits its designed magnitude), and a hard clamp on pitch / roll constant force. The low-speed floor keeps taxi and approach from feeling limp when the air-load math is small; raise it if the stick goes too loose at low speed, lower it if parked/taxi centering feels overbearing.

Stick feel

Control-system feel, G-load stiffening, dynamic deadband widening, control-edge bumper, and trim authority. Covers how the stick reacts to the aircraft's instantaneous state outside the basic spring + air-load model.

At the top of this group is the Control system selector — a per-aircraft choice (saved in the profile) of how the controls are driven:

Manual — mechanical / cable controls that load with airspeed and stiffen under G (C172, TBM 930, King Air 350i).
Hydraulic-boosted — gentler, smoother boosted feel; aero loading is present but reduced (747-8).
Fly-by-wire — a constant side-stick spring that doesn't load with speed or G; engine rumble and the stall stick-shaker are also silenced on the side-stick (A320neo).

Effect gains

Per-effect scalars for everything the bridge fires as discrete rumble / buffet / shudder channels — the full effect catalogue: ground roll (runway / gear bumps / brake / touchdown / reverse / nosewheel shimmy / ground-acceleration pitch cue) plus an undercarriage-type selector (wheels / skis / floats) that scales the continuous ground rumbles, engine rumble, airframe buffets (stall, stall stick-shaker, overspeed, Mach, spoiler, flap, gear, turbulence), mechanical one-shots (gear deploy, flap step), and sustained aero-drag pitch forces (flap drag, spoiler drag, gear drag, propwash). Drop any to 0% to silence that channel without affecting the others.

Rate damping

Body-axis rotation rates subtract from the commanded pitch / roll forces, so a rapid deflection decays back to trim. Two sliders, one per axis. Acts like viscous damping in a real stick.

Stick drop

Gravity bias on the elevator at low airspeed. In a non-power-assisted aircraft (most GA) the elevator is unloaded when there's no air flowing over it — cable rigging + gravity pulls the surface down, which pulls the yoke / stick forward. Two sliders: how hard the bias pulls, and the airspeed at which it fades to zero. Defaults are tuned for a Cessna-class feel; drop Force toward 0 to silence the effect on jet / heavy profiles.

Trim

One Enable trim toggle. With trim off, trim does nothing to the stick. With it on, trimming eases the held airspeed-loaded force (it's computed against your hand input above the trimmed position) and shifts the centre to the trimmed position — so you can release the stick and it stays where you trimmed it. Trim is elevator-first: one Elevator strength slider, with aileron strength tucked under an Advanced disclosure.

The older centre-only trim mode was retired — there is no longer a separate switch that only shifted the centre without relieving force. The 1.0 release also corrected the MSFS elevator and aileron trim telemetry feeding trim; if trim felt ineffective on an older build, retest it with a current build before changing your profile.

Autopilot follow

Spring centre can track the autopilot's commanded position while AP is engaged, but current builds treat this as a small cue, not a full servo. Bundled and saved profiles leave AP follow off unless you explicitly enable it. Two sliders: Authority (how much of the AP command is used; range 0%–8%, default 5% when enabled), and Strength (spring stiffness during follow; default 25%). On stock MSFS, physical stick motion is still seen by the sim as pilot input, so large AP-follow forces can fight or disconnect the autopilot. Use only the low single-digit authority range unless you own the input axis with a virtual-device / HID-filter setup.

Watchdog

Stale-data behaviour. Two sliders: how many seconds without a sim telemetry packet before dynamic forces start fading out, and how long the fade takes. Triggers on sim crash, freeze, or Active Pause.

Slider interaction

Sliders accept the usual three input methods. Drag the thumb, or click anywhere along the track to jump there. To use the mouse wheel, click the slider once first to give it focus — hovering and scrolling does not capture the wheel, so you can scroll the Tuning page past hovered sliders without accidentally nudging them. Arrow keys nudge the focused slider by one step (1% on the master gain, smaller on per-effect sliders that have a wider underlying range).

Dirty indicators and resets

When a slider's value differs from what's stored in the active profile, two glyphs appear next to its value:

A small amber dirty dot on the profile picker at the top of the page — summarises “this profile has unsaved changes” whenever any slider is dirty.
A back-arrow reset glyph to the left of the value on every dirty slider row. Click it to revert just that slider to the value stored in the active profile.

Each section header (Forces, Stick feel, Ground effects, etc.) also carries a back-arrow glyph that appears whenever any slider in that section is dirty. Click it to reset the entire section in one go. And there's a Discard button on the Profile card that reverts every change at once. Resets are local-only — they don't touch the saved profile, so you can experiment freely and reach for the back-arrow whenever you want a fresh start.

Figure 4. Master gain edited from default 100% to 85%. The back-arrow reset glyph appears next to the value (click to revert that single slider), an amber dirty-dot sits next to the profile picker, an UNSAVED pill lights up top-right of the Profile card, and a Discard button appears (reverts every dirty slider at once). Section / per-slider reset glyphs in the collapsed Forces / Stick feel / Effect gains expanders work the same way.

Figure 5. Same surface, different edited values. Identical dirty signals: reset glyph beside the value, UNSAVED pill on the Profile card, dirty-dot on the picker.

Saving your profile

The profile picker at the top of the Tuning page has two inline buttons:

Save — overwrites the active profile with the current slider values. Disabled when the profile is a starter preset (those are read-only).
Save as… — opens a small dialog to save under a new name. Typical pattern: pick the starter closest to your aircraft, fly, adjust to taste, then save an editable copy.

To revert without saving, use the per-slider, per-section, or Discard reset surfaces above. Starter profiles are read-only, so Save is disabled for them and Save as is the path to make your own editable aircraft profile.

What's next

A practical walkthrough of how to take the defaults and turn them into something you'd fly every day lives in the Tuning guide. Once you've got a profile you like, save it, and see Profiles for how to manage multiple profiles.