What's the best Star Wars flight game?
Ton's of keys isn't much of a problem if you have a half-descent joystick. Here's what I use:
First, forget about the hat switch for POV. The radar is good enough.
HAT-LEFT = Shield power to Lasers
HAT-RIGHT = Laser power to Shields.
HAT-UP = Toggle shield configuration
These are the most important ones. In the middle of a dogfight when someone gets on your butt and blasts away your rear sheilds, HAT-UP to move sheilds to rear and HAT-RIGHT constantly to keep boosting their power.
So with your half decent joystick, you've still got at least 4 buttons on the stick itself (one trigger plus 3 thumb). Put in the extra money to get a joystick with a shift button. You use the shift-button with your left thumb.
Then you can do things like this:
Trigger - fire lazers
Shift+Trigger - fire countermeasure
Top button - select nearest enemy
Shift+Top button - select next objective
Etc.
I cycle weapons a lot so I put that as HAT-down for extra-quick access (for when you get that special chance to proton someone without even needing a lock)
Of course you need a throttle control and stick rotation, this takes care of speed and z-axis rotation.
Then you should have at least 4 base buttons to use with your remaining four fingers with. My choices are:
Cycle weapons
Cycle weapon configs
And i usaully put the adjust recharge settings down here as well since I use them quite frequently.
Tricks:
Keep shields at regular recharge, and when needed, give lasers full recharge, and then just keep flicking your thumb on HAT-Right to pop the extra laser energy over to sheilds. I could be just watching a pot boil, but I swear the sheilds recharge faster this way. Any besides, in the heat of battle you definitely don't want your lazers running dry. They fire with more power when they are in the double-charge stage than in the single-charge stage.
When your dogfighting, thumb the select nearest button to target the guy who's firing on your arse.
I'm a huge joystick buff... I even play all my FPS with a joystick. With the shift button and hat switch and throttle and rotation I can map 24 or more commands to my joystick, so I never have to go to the keyboard during gameplay, unlike my mouse which only has 4 buttons. And the upright-nature of the joystick is better in the long-run on your wrist than the downward angled mouse which makes your twist your forearm.
Just make sure you can still move your hand off your joystick and hit the "H" key real fast without missing. In single-player mode, aborting a mission is much better than dying. If you're defending your own base, or you have a flagship nearby, then you can alt-"E"ject and get picked up. But otherwise the other side picks you up...