Beta WinWing Orion Throttle Base II Free & open source

Your afterburner detent,
set for whatever you just jumped into.

Climb into a Hornet and the detent moves to your Hornet setting. Switch to a Tomcat and it follows. Quit DCS and your throttle goes back to neutral, so your other sims are untouched.

Download Unzip, double-click install.cmd. That is the whole install.
The problem

Six steps, every time you change aircraft

If you fly more than one module you know this one. The detent position that feels right in the Hornet is wrong in the Tomcat, so every single time you swap aircraft:

01Alt-tab out of DCS
02Open SimAppPro
03Find your throttle
04Open the afterburner page
05Click the right row, hit Activate
06Tab back into the cockpit
With this installed: none of them.

Forget the routine once and you are either lighting the burner early or fighting to get it to light at all. This removes the chance to forget.

Ships ready to fly

Twelve aircraft already set up

Each bar is your throttle's full travel. The mark is where the detent bites — everything past it is burner. The Tomcat gives you nearly half the throttle in afterburner; the MiG-21 barely a sliver.

Aircraft   Throttle travel  0 — 100 Detent
throttle range detent afterburner

Every number is yours to change. The Corsair and the Hercules have no afterburner at all — they simply park the throttle at its neutral 75 and stay out of the way. NONE is the catch-all for any aircraft you have not set up.

The editor

One window, no files to go hunting for

The Afterburner detent ratios window listing twelve aircraft with their detent percentages. The FA-18 and F-5 rows are highlighted green because both are set to 82, the value currently on the throttle.
Opens from the Start Menu under WinWing Afterburner Ratios. The green rows are the setting live on the throttle right now — here it is 82, so both aircraft set to 82 light up. Hit Activate on any row to push it straight to the hardware and feel it at your desk, without launching DCS.
The Add aircraft dialog: a text field for the aircraft name, help text reading e.g. FA-18 matches FA-18C_hornet, NONE = fallback for anything unmatched, a ratio spinner set to 75, and OK and Cancel buttons.
Adding an aircraft is a name and a number. The name is matched inside the DCS aircraft name, so typing FA-18 covers FA-18C_hornet — you never have to know the exact internal name.

Follows you mid-session

Jump from the Viper to the Tomcat without leaving the mission. The detent changes with you.

Tune from the cockpit

Change a number while DCS is running and it takes hold in about two seconds. Move the throttle, feel it, adjust.

Clean exit

Quitting DCS returns the throttle to neutral, so nothing is left configured for DCS in your other games.

Nothing else to install

No Node, no Python, no .NET. It does not modify a single DCS, SimAppPro or WinWing file, and never needs admin rights.

Sensible fallback

Jump into something you have never set up and it uses your NONE entry, rather than leaving the last aircraft's setting on the stick.

Updates in place

Download a newer release and double-click install again. Your ratios carry over and the old version is removed for you.

Before you start

What you need

The throttle
A WinWing Orion Throttle Base II. The same hardware is also sold branded WinUSA or WinCtrl — all of them work.
SimAppPro, once
You need it one time, to calibrate the physical detent — that is the reference point everything else is measured against. After that you can close SimAppPro and leave it closed for good. The settings live on the throttle itself, so they survive even if you uninstall it.
One F-14 setting
Heatblur handle the Tomcat's detent their own way, so DCS needs to agree with your throttle. It is two numbers on the Special tab, and the instructions walk you through it. Every other aircraft needs nothing.
Read this bit — it is a beta

It works well day to day, but WinWing do not publish how their throttles talk to the PC, so all of this was worked out by careful observation. Treat it as community software rather than a vendor feature.

It only ever changes the one afterburner setting. Your calibration is never touched, and nothing else on the device is written to. Bug reports very welcome.

Get the latest release Setup instructions are at the top of the page.
Free & open source

Support the project

No ads, no trackers, no paid tier. If it saved you from the SimAppPro alt-tab shuffle and got you back to flying, you can put something in the tip jar. Entirely optional — every part of this stays free either way.

Buy me a coffee