Hi there!
I am afraid I will disappoint you with what I have to say because it may not be what you are looking to read/head. But please bear with me here.
Unfortunately there’s no cookie-cutter or recipe or generic way of setting up your hardware correctly. This is simply because setting it in a certain way may be correct for a specific helicopter and completely wrong for all the other helicopters. And it’s not just about different models. Two helicopters of the same model can behave differently!
I have also chased that sense of doing things correctly in the past but the brutal truth is that there is no single correct answer. I could pretend there was, give you some general pointers and perhaps even convince you that my way is the correct one. Trust me, I have seen that happen in the simming world quite often and people get a lot of views on their articles/videos. Folks do get nice results but it’s not necessarily the “best” way or the “proper” way.
But I do have some pointers and tips for you. I can tell you how I set things up. And why.
In X-Plane, I pull the Control Response and Stability Augmentation sliders to the left. That’s it. I don’t fool around with curves or any other settings.
Even with the VIRPIL controllers, I didn’t change anything on the VIRPIL software.
On DCS, it’s all default. No curve changes, nothing.
I know it’s not super-exciting or interesting but here’s the thing: after years and years of tweaking, improving and chasing that “feeling” of doing it “the right way” I found out something that, no matter what I did, it was never the right way because I could never, ever replicate the real deal.
Yes, we can make it more “realistic” (note the quotes). We can make it better. We can make it easier for us. But, unless my controller is completely busted – it has interference in the center or has some potentiometer issues (which I don’t have in ages since I started using new controllers), I just adapt to it.
Like I said, I spent years frustratingly searching for that magic feeling of success. But the more I tried and the more I spoke to real pilots, the more I learned that it doesn’t really matter because it won’t be like the real thing and that feeling will eventually be fake and void of actual meaning. And I still spent hours trying to make it better when I should be flying.
I think, from my experience, that this is the best advice I can give you. Exciting? No. Ground-breaking? Hell, no. But this is my honest opinion on the matter.
