CLS-E MKII or CLS-E NG?

[ihatesignature]

I’ve yet to find a good comparison of these two other than the specs on the website.

I’m a student pilot finishing up his PPL (well, waiting to schedule the checkride) and starting his instrument training. I’m looking to invest in a decent enough setup that will feel realistic enough to simulate the kinds of feedback I’d get from a yoke eg; flying an approach in IMC in a C172/C182/SR22.

I was a bit worried that eg; the smaller forces in the NG would be too weak to convey any kind of realism. For those that have tried or own both: is the CLS-E MKII considered “necessary” in your eyes to achieve an acceptable level of realism in the yoke during non-aerobatic maneuvers? Will I be satisfied with the NG? It’s a 50% price difference so it’s non-trivial.

One last question I didn’t find the answer to… is the “speed” the same for both yokes? I understand the CLS-E MKII has much more force, but does the speed at which the yoke would eg; move due to the wind change?

I own the Thrustmaster TPR pedals (which although not force feedback are sufficiently realistic for my needs) and am getting the Honeycomb Bravo thrust quadrant when it comes out (honestly i hate vernier thrust/prop/mixture and couldn’t care less about realism of this piece).

[moriarty]

I too am interested in this.

[Diego Bürgin]

Hi ihatesignature and moriarty

Diego from development here.

EDIT:CLSE-MKII has more travel in Elevator and has a display on the yoke.
https://www.brunner-innovation.swiss/product/cls-e-mk-ii-yoke/

For everything else the yokes are the same except for the max force. I would say that the CLSE-NG is a bit smoother, but has significantly lesser force.

For the settings that need to be done, you can download a profile made by other users.
But if you want to do your own adjustments, this is not plug and play, expect many hours of tuning to get a nice feel.

The features that work well:
– Realistic trimming
– Movement when using Autopilot
– Stickshaker
– Increasing/Decreasing forces when changing airspeed or deflection of the yoke.
Basically you can set an increasing resistance, the further you push the yoke from it’s trimmed center point.
And Airspeed further increases that force.

If you fly using X-Plane you get the best trimming and AP behavior. The other sims have some trade off.
Specifically when disengaging the AP the plane will not keep it’s attitude.

What works somewhat:
– The wind turbulences really isn’t the best feature, if expect to feel each gust, you’ll be disappointed.
We just don’t get enough data from the sim to program it any better, so it will feel somewhat random.
Same for the ground vibrations.

Due to the way we communicate with X-Plane, the update rate between yoke and sim is roughly half the FPS.
So you want to have at least 30 fps in X-Plane or more.

Regarding the movement speed.
It doesn’t move very fast. We needed to factor in some damping for stability.

That’s all the for’s and against’s I can think of.

Best Regards
Diego

[hamsammich]

Valuable post, Diego. It’s good to know the state of affairs. Do you suppose, with sufficient effort, it will be possible to end up with functionality in FS2020 similar to X-Plane, specifically the trim/AP functionality? Because I suspect it will be the vastly more prevalent platform, and probably sooner than we think.

Best,
Marshall

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