The turn that wouldn’t bite
Last week we taught the phone’s virtual stick to bank and hold instead of spiralling into the dirt, and we were pleased with ourselves. The next field report was not: “turns are slow and wide, it’s impossible to dogfight — and I can’t go inverted at all.” All three complaints were true, and all three were ours.
What we actually shipped
The bank-hold instructor stopped the graveyard spiral, but it confiscated the dogfight on the way out. The same probe that caught the spiral put numbers on the new sins. The stick mapped linearly to bank angle, and a level turn’s appetite grows with the tangent of bank, not the bank — so half stick was a 26° lean pulling 1.1 g, a stately 2.5°/s of turn, and even three-quarter stick managed just 4.4°/s. A desktop mouse pilot idles through 30°/s. Worse, the pitch channel’s rate damper — tuned to keep a hands-off phone from porpoising — kept eating the thumb’s pull: full up-stick for four seconds produced a polite 225 m climb and no loop. And the bank hold was welded to ±80°: past that it actively rolled you back. No loop over the top, no split-S, no barrel roll, no way to put the airplane on its back by any input. We’d fixed “I can’t control roll” by making roll impossible to misuse — and impossible to use.
Command the turn, not the pose
Four changes, each one measured before it stayed:
- The stick commands turn rate now. Deflection maps onto tan(bank) — the load a level turn actually carries — so the middle of the thumb’s throw holds the middle of the turn envelope. Half stick is a 60°, 2 g bite; three-quarter is a 74° carve.
- The feed-forward pull is sized to reach the limiter. The stall-and-G instructor is the authority on “how hard”; the turn’s pull just has to ask loudly enough to hit it. Deep turns now ride the 6 g ceiling instead of sagging at 4.
- A hard pull gets the airplane back. Full up-stick out-muscles the rate damper and, with the stick centered, releases the bank hold entirely — a loop must not be arm-wrestled back upright at the top. Sideways plus pull keeps the hold, because bank-and-yank is a turn, not a loop. The flight-path hold is weighted by the cockpit’s own up-vector, so it holds the path inverted too instead of shoving the nose at the ground.
- The rim rolls. Slam the stick all the way sideways with the pull released and the instructor stops capturing and just rolls — through vertical, onto your back, all the way around. Ease off and it catches the nearest carve. That’s the split-S door the old cap welded shut.
Before and after, same probe
Sparrowhawk, throttle firewalled, each input held:
- Half stick: 2.5°/s → 6.6°/s. Three-quarter: 4.4°/s → 17.4°/s. Rim plus full pull: 29.3°/s, which is the physics ceiling for a 6 g level turn at that speed — while gaining altitude, not bleeding 500 m of it.
- Full up-stick: was a 225 m climb; now a clean loop over the top in six seconds.
- Rim slam: rolls through inverted at the airframe’s full rate and gives up 27 m in four seconds of rolling. Release from your back and you’re wings-level in 2 s.
- Split-S: roll onto the back in under two seconds, pull through, recover level 0.4 s after the pull ends. The emulated-phone playtest flew every one of these on the live client — loop, rolls, split-S — and landed none of them in the terrain.
The release contract is unchanged: let go of the stick and the same loops roll you wings-level in about a second. Desktop mouse aim, keyboard, and the flight model itself are untouched, and fine aim keeps its cursor semantics on guns and turrets.
The confession
Two of them, this pass. First, the obvious one: the sluggishness was not a regression that crept in — it was the exact shape of the fix we shipped and celebrated last week. The probe we wrote then had the scenarios to catch it (a mid-stick turn, a full-up pull); we just read the “no altitude lost” column and stopped reading. Second: the extended probe’s first fleet run showed the Starfang starting every scenario 12 m/s downhill, and we nearly “fixed” the instructor for it. The real gap was in the probe — the live client folds an auto-trim wheel into every pitch command, and the probe wasn’t modelling it. The Starfang isn’t broken; it’s just a jet that hates flying slow, same as it does for keyboard pilots. The probe models trim now, and the scenario list — loop, split-S, rim roll, release from inverted — is the regression fence this controller should have had from day one.