Time for a new flight stick... X52 Pro or X-55 Rhino???

[Schmobius]

I know that John Luke has made his choice, but I want to give my 2 cents for the sake of anyone else reading through this.

About a week or two in, I'm loving my X-55. They clearly used Andre The Giant for determining the size for the hand positions though.

My hands are average-sized at best, but I still don't find it problematic; even if this means that EVERY button is not automatically under a fingertip at rest. If I were designing it for my hands, I would have scaled it down a bit, but I can still reach everything with small movements.

The stick is decent enough, but the throttle is glorious. Smooth as butter, gives nice resistance when you turn the friction up a bit (still smooth), and all the switches are great. I will point out that the metal switches are not what I'd call true toggle switches though, and they move vertically, not horizontally. You can push them either up or down, but they snap back to center, rather than staying up or down. This probably gives more functions, but I would have preferred true toggles, and also I would have preferred horizontal movement, because it would be easier to flick them with my thumb without taking it off the throttle. As is, I can only hit two of the ones up top, and only in an up direction, without moving my hand at all. It's not like a pilot in a real fighter jet or commercial airliner can hit all their buttons and switches with hands on the throttle and stick anyway, so I'm not that upset about it, but they missed a chance to go from good to great.

The only thing that I think is even below "good" on the throttle is the throttle-lock. The throttles are able to move side-to-side just enough to cause the throttle lock to get pushed out a bit. This probably could have been solved by just making the throttle-lock peg longer. I've never had the throttles work themselves completely free of each other in normal use, but it gets more play in them than I'd like. I just keep pushing the lock back in tighter every few hours.

I found the sticks to be very stable, even on a couch, let alone a hard surface. Not perfectly stationary, but we're talking 1/8" or less movement after hours of play. I created a thread discussing how to solve this (http://elitepve.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=2818), and I have pictures of what I ended up with, after many posts of brainstorming, and even a little frustration. I did end up velcro-ing everything down, but that was only to get the kind of stability one normally has to bolt them down for. They were very usable without that. I can just THROW everything around, and the bases of the sticks don't budge now, let alone move out of place. I'm generally not that violent with my movements, but the solid, locked-down feeling is nice.