I wanted to write up a review of my experience with the honeycomb Alpha+Bravo. I have used a bunch of peripherals up to this point. For Star Citizen I tried the T16000k, then upgraded to Virpil Hosam, Tobbi, MFG rudders, Turtlebeach velocity 1 + throttle quadrant. I recently gave away the TurtleBeach setup to ‘upgrade’ to the Honeycomb rig. To start with the positive, 95% of the experience has been great, default bindings in MSFS are good and I like the immersion of having built in switches for many of the systems of a typical GA airplane. Hardware is solid and stock mounting options are good (although the clamps protrude a bit much and can get in the way).
Before jumping into my main gripes I should clarify that I am simming for the express purpose of getting my PPL (got that in Dec when I had the Turtlebeach rig) and now my instrument rating. The two major Achilles heels of these systems are the tension in the yoke and the utterly garbage trim wheel. By themselves neither of these would be a deal breaker, but pair together they make an absolutely terrible experience. I can’t trim to save my life and this makes practicing flight maneuvers, VOR tracking, and shooting instrument approaches finicky and aggravating. I find myself spending more than half of my flight time just fiddling with trim and that takes away my focus from the important value adds of learning the avionics and practicing comms through PilotEdge.
I have tried creating a more realistic trim response following YT guides including
Authentikit solution and this
JoystickGremlin I found the Joystick Gremlin approach worked the best (still shit compared to the axis on the TB VelocityOne) but then you have to rebind everything in MSFS to the Vjoy which is an absolute slog with MSFS’s terrible control mapping system. I finally gave up and am using
cptn.dp’s add-on After all these fixes I still find trimming to be garbage and absolutely immersion breaking compared to real flying. If you do manage to get the trim set, the smallest power or pitch adjustment will completely throw it off.
As mentioned, the trim issues by itself would be fine if it were easy to do minor compensation with yoke inputs. However, the Alpha has a ridiculously tight tension that makes anything outside of the 10% center very taxing for any precision flying more than a couple dozen minutes. I have spent a ton of time trying to dial in response curves to compensate for this issue and there’s no good fix. If curves stay linear standard envelope flight is taxing due to the yoke tension. Ramp up the expo and then maneuvers are extremely touchy and hard to control.. I’m at my breaking point.
To wrap it up, the fact that Honeycomb didn’t use an axis for their trim is maddening and that, paired with an extremely stiff, non-adjustable yoke tension, makes precision flying in GA aircraft difficult, unrealistic, and immersion breaking. I so wish I hadn’t given away my TurtleBeach, it was such a better overall experience. Instead of working on my training I have dumped around 20hrs troubleshooting this ‘upgraded’ setup. Maybe there’s something i’m missing (please for the love of god chime in if you have any ideas), or maybe I am a garbage pilot, but the switch to Honeycomb for flight training has been terrible. I hope this review helps someone else that’s considering ‘upgrading’ for the purposes of flight training.