This is a very interesting thread. Realism from a simulation! What will they think of next?
Years ago (in another century) we were tasked with finding out how a real pilot would control a "joy stick" if he or she was tasked to use it to keep a "tracking dot" centered on a circular target. The circular target was a computer-controlled circle with a variable diameter (under computer control) and the tracking dot was just that... a small dot on the screen whose position could be moved up/down and left/right using the joy stick. To make matters interesting, the computer would know the joy stick position at all times and would (depending on how strenuous to make the task that day) sometimes move the target circle away from the position of the joy stick. The closer the dot cursor got to the circular target, the faster the target moved away. Pilots seemed to handle this situation without a problem, keeping the dot cursor centered on the circular target seemingly without conscious effort. If that's what it takes to be a fighter pilot, I failed miserably when I was allowed to try it.
Part of this research was to discover what kind of joy stick pilots would perform best with in actual combat. A modern jet fighter experiences combat-close conditions in an aerial dog-fight for just a very few seconds, at the most. At the end of that short period of time, they are either dead or victorious. There are very few survivable ejections in a supersonic dog-fight.
Much to my surprise (not being an aviator myself), the "best" joy sticks for fighting are very stiff "force sticks" with torque motor feedback to let the pilot know the effect of air flowing along the control surfaces of the (imaginary) airplane. Some joy sticks in some aircraft may even have mechanical linkages to the control surfaces, which of course provides a very realistic feedback, especially under stall conditions, with our without ground effect. Unfortunately, "fly-by-wire" with remote sensors and actuators appears to have overtaken the military aircraft designs, but I think civilian aviation still has a long way to go to catch up... assuming that is even desirable.
One task on my "bucket list" is to learn how to fly an acrobatic bi-plane and do some fancy maneuvers a safe ten or twelve thousand feet or so above the ground. Ummm. I think I would practice first in a realistic trainer sim for a few sorties, after I get my private pilot's license, and maybe sit behind an instructor pilot who knows how to fly acrobatics really, really, well.. There used to be a guy like that who flew out of a little airfield in Moraine OH. He went by the name Red Baron when he was doing his stuff at the annual Dayton Air Show, but his real name was Harold Johnson and he was a former mayor of Moraine. I never got to meet him, and it's now too late to drive north for flying lessons. He died here in Florida on January 12, 2011.
Anyhoo, we had two kinds of joy sticks to play with. The original allowed a large amount of pitch and yaw movement of the stick, which may be good for learning how to fly an airplane, but is waaaay too slow for high-speed maneuvering. So most of our research was directed at the force-sticks, very stiff joy sticks that used strain-gauge instrumentation to determine stick "movement". Real pilots did well with these, but we did not have any means to adjust the joy stick output as a function of force applied to the stick, other than by scaling the strain gauge signal... which of course is what we did, but it would have been nice to have some sort of mechanical adjustment too. And amazing as all this was to a young technician in the 1970s, it was all over much too soon, and I then had to learn how to play nice with CO2 lasers for the Air Force Weapons Laboratory in Albuquerque, NM. These were high-powered diagnostic lasers, not the "weapons grade" chemical lasers the Air Force installed in the Airborne Laser Laboratory or ALL The ALL program has since been de-commissioned, but the ALL aircraft was once placed on static display outside at the Air Force Musuem. These static displays are changed often, so it is prudent to call ahead if there is a particular aircraft you want to see.
It would be interesting (and expensive) to introduce the simulation into a real airplane cockpit, like the commercial airlines use to train crews. There are one or two of these open and available to the the public at the Air Force Museum, located in Area B at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Dayton, OH. Admission to the museum is free, but there is always a line of kids (and sometimes adults) waiting their turn at flying the simulator.
