Kodiak vs Caravan

I regularly think about purchasing the Kodiak as it’s a beautiful and realistic aircraft. However, with the Caravan being there for free I haven’t been able to get myself spending the extra money. With the NXi becoming the default G1000 soon, the Caravan will become even more realistic, and there’s really not much I miss with it. Opening the doors or watching cargo boxes appear in the back is fun maybe one or two times and that’s it. I fly for the “travel” aspect and for that the Caravan is perfect, easy to handle, and it’s basically the same purpose aircraft as the Kodiak. So while I hugely appreciate what they did with the latter and it’s still on my wishlist, I never felt that I really should buy it.

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In that version from the video P-factor was something like three times or more higher than it should be. If you tried to rotate any slower than that, even when not at MTOW, the left wing rolled over near instantly, and not because it had stalled either. :joy:

Looking forward to the update.

I don’t understand what you are suggesting as alternative? If/when the Kodiak’s pitch behaviour is made more suitable for people with, say, Honeycomb yoke then that will undoubtedly involve giving the plane hidden curves under the table. The player will fly with “linear” curves, except they aren’t really linear because the plane is automatically setting you with curves. The other option is extremity dead zones, e.g. the sim plane only represents the first 50% of yoke travel on the real plane and the maximum elevator is reduced accordingly.

There is no other way to squeeze 8 inches into 4 inches. Either it will be more twitchy, have non-linear curves, or have extremity deadzone.

Player with longer yoke could give his controller positive curves to cancel out the default curves I guess. Though that would be harder to gauge than it would be for player with short throw controller to set a curve.

Current version of Honeycomb yoke goes for $350, only $50 less than the longer throw (8.3" per TM website) Thrustmaster Boeing yoke. At this price point extended boutique sticks, at least ones with the more simply grips, also become possibility. I don’t think long throw controller’s are really outside consumer range.

I’m starting to think the issues with the Kodiak go much deeper than yoke curves. Both long and short throw yokes can have perfectly linear curves… it will just require less movement of one to move the control surface the same as the other. Nether should cause issues with aircraft handling. Joysticks are another matter of course. But I believe the twitchiness of this aircraft is more deeply rooted in issues with the flight model. This whole long throw yoke business seems like an attempt to mask the real issues.

My only comment on that would be don’t knock it till you’ve tried it. Honestly, if you tried it with either the Fulcrum or the Yoko, it would change your opinion.

This goes for any aircraft, and nothing to do with the Kodiak specifically. I’ve read many threads over the last few years, about many different planes with the same types of observations from others. “It’s too twitchy.” or “Why is it so violent on rotation?” I’ve never seen it simply because of my flight controls.

A yoke with a lot of travel on pitch is always going to feel better that a joystick, or even a cheaper yoke. If the plane was tested with one of those yokes, instead of a joystick, then it will feel worse.

I explored that in another thread I think. Here we go:

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I think joystick with 20cm extension will typically beat a yoke in pitch travel. Even the sub compact VKB SCG grip on Gunfighter base should be around the same ballpark there as Fulcrum. Yoke might win on roll axis though.

Too much ego on these pages
Too many young men desperate to be seen as experts
Too many p*****g competitions

I did a review of this thread and I frankly don’t see what you find so offensive. I see some mud throwing around the possibility that Kodiak will be re-optimized for cheaper controllers at expense of those with more expensive and more realistic ones, which seems a legitimate concern. Is that it?

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No it won’t, if the resolution is low to begin with. You haven’t increased the resolution of its axes, and you haven’t increased the distance it takes to go from one extremity to another. All you have done is made the existing resolution easier to access. It would be like attaching a pole to the end of a yoke. It still has the same travel on pitch, you are just further from it. A better analogy might be to put the poll on roll instead. But the answer is the same, the yoke with a meter long stick to hold still has the same resolution on the axis, and it has the same amount of rotation from one extremity to another. All you have done is made it easier to set one particular value out of, say 4096.

On cheaper yokes, and sticks for that matter, you have two problems: low resolution, and short throw. The two together leads to twitchy control inputs. While you can do nothing about the yoke on pitch, you are right about the stick IF it has a higher resolution. The stick extension should make some difference. On a yoke you can’t do anything about the throw on pitch, but on roll the same trick should work, but again only if you have a high resolution to work with.

It wouldn’t make much difference on the original Honeycomb Alpha as it has 8bits per axes, or 256 discrete settings for pitch, and roll, coupled with relatively short throw on pitch. Strap a 6 foot pole to it, and you still only have 256 settings for roll. All you might notice there is you move the pole some distance, and nothing happens.

The Xbox controllers are interesting in this regard. Apparently their little sticks have 16bit precision, which is wastefully high considering the tiny sticks. But put a 5 foot pole on them, and you might be able to make use of that! :joy:

Yeah, but on the other hand, almost every other aircraft in the sim works perfectly fine with a long travel yoke, a short one, or even a joystick. There’s something screwed up with the Kodiak. I think blaming the yoke travel is just skirting the real issue, It may be compounding the issue, but it is not the issue.

Well it doesn’t feel like it to me, sorry. I doubt I would say the same if I was using a controller though. Besides the developer has openly stated that it is about the yoke, and that it was designed, or perhaps more accurately tested with, a longer throw yoke, and they are changing that, to somewhere between a controller, and a Fulcrum/Yoko.

So now no-one will be happy. :wink:

Yes, but the SWS rep on the forums here has acknowledged there are flight modelling issues with the aircraft. Those need to be sorted as a top priority.

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I will be interested to look at their change logs. And as ever I would recommend holding on to previous versions for running comparisons/reversion if necessary.

Not really, a lot of aircraft are adjusted for what most people have, short throw devices. With my Fulcrum my default profile actual accelerates the curve slightly to compensate for the default curves most devs use, linear on many aircaft is not responsive enough.

Now - I do suspect there is an oddity regardless of yoke type as the Kodiak seems to me to have a slight non linearity on rotation regardless of curves, a slight tendency to suddenly rotate meaning if you are heavy handed it is easy to pull back more than you should so when it does rotate it noses up too much, but that tendency to stick to the ground is relatively minor. The twitchiness people complained about seems more curve related.

Regardless there is a patch due, arguing about what are relatively minor issues compared to other planes like some of the Carenado ones which are more simplified parodies is pointless at this stage,

Wait for the patch.

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Theoretically valid point, but every joystick that you would normally put an extension on has so stupidly high sensor resolution it doesn’t come even close to mattering for human begins, even with an extension. Gunfighter is 15 bits, which is actually quite a bit more than Fulcrum which seems to be 12 bit (not that it matters, at least not resolution wise).

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That is indeed higher than the Yoko as well. So popping that on the floor between your feet with a pole attached would probably feel really good. I wonder why they did that. Or indeed why MS have 16bits for their controllers.

People do that with the MS FFB all the time.

It is worth noting that short throw yokes and notchy sticks are not necessarily that way just to save money, it can be a design decision.

Sure a long throw yoke needs more solid construction and better load bearing which adds to the costs. However there are other disadvantages, in particular they take up more desktop space. They are also not as good where fast super responsive control is needed for example in military or aerobatic flight sims. Hence I still occasionally jump on my MS FFB2 because the fulcrum is wonderful but does not suit all types of flight.

This is getting way off-topic. Essentially the Kodiak FM is far better overall than the sanitised Caravan one but some people do have issues. Wait for the patch.

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Yes, it will be interesting to see what changes they make. I also hope the Analogue Caravan gets some attention.

Since I wasn’t able to find the information on the VKB site, I had to make some assumptions. So assuming that the average stick has 90 degrees of rotation, 45 degrees per side, has 15bit resolution, and assuming your average human would be able to resolve about 1mm of travel with any degree of accuracy. That 90 degree arc has 32768 points along its length, so multiply by 4 to get its circumference of 131702. Let’s call that millimetres for the previous assumption. So to give us 1mm resolution on that 90 degree arc, that gives us a radius of 20,860.76mm.

You would need a pole 20.86m long attached to that stick to feel that 1mm resolution. How do you reach the pedals. :blush:

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Well said. It seems those that are dismissing the importance this can make are ignorant to what a difference this can make. Labelling those of us that are not complaining as smug and saying we are brushing issues aside proves that. It’s perfectly fine to have an alternate view but without having owned both types of controller any counter opinion is based on what exactly.

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