A few weeks ago I bought Elite Dangerous on a whim. It has been all I have played since. It is awesome for a multitude of reasons, the greatest of all being that the game is as stressful as you want it to be.
Want a nice relaxing pootle about space having a look around? Stick to federation space and you're fine
Love trading stock for big dollars? It's there
Want to blow motherfuckers into the next life? We have that in spades
Want to eschew being sensible and want to learn to fly a spaceship with no assists in 6 degrees of freedom? In combat situations? It's your funeral.
The latter is where I'm going with it and it is taking me down some very odd roads to get a satisfactory solution. While the typical HOTAS set up works reasonably well it still doesn't really offer a great 6DOF (especially for the price of an X52) solution. The way to do it looks to be to fly with two sticks. One stick mapped to traditional flight controls (pitch/roll/yaw) and the other to translational controls (up/down/left/right/throttle).
I already have a Saitek Cyborg Evo from when I used to fly helos in Battlefield2. The Evo isn't that great as it has a very stiff centering spring and the deadzone is a bit poor making sucky for accurate pitch and roll manoeuvres but it will be fine for translational controls where the penalty of overshooting isn't so great. For stick two I've ordered a Defender Cobra M5, which is a Russian made stuck with hall effect sensors for hight accuracy pitch/roll, which will be my right stick.
Here are what looks to be the best binds (near 40 controls!) I can think of without actually testing them out. Subject to change
This will take some getting used to but the benefits are immense for ship control and above all enjoyment of the game. I can also fly with just the right stick for mooching about.
The astute amongst you might ask why mouselook if both hands are on the sticks? I have an EDtracker which is an arduino based mouse emulator using a gyro/accelerometer that straps to my head which is nearly as good as TrackIR and 1/5th of the price
Anyway some cool shit can be done with this set up