This week, at CES in Las Vegas, Moza revealed their shiny new pedals. But these pedals don’t bring together brake pad and brake disk to slow the turning of wheels on tarmac, instead they manipulate the rear-most control surface of a plane to induce yaw (or whatever the no-doubt incredibly complicated helicopter equivalent is). That’s right, Moza’s MRP Rudder Pedals round out Moza’s line up of flight sim hardware.

Moza now boast a formidable line of entry-level, mid-level and high-level sim racing wheelbases and wheel rims alongside the newly announced MRP Rudder Pedals which will complement their FFB joysticks (AB6 & AB9) and FFB yolk.

Moza also dominated a good percentage of the Traxion.gg homepage on Tuesday when they lifted their embargo on 3 new wheel rims, covered expertly as always by our very own Ross McGregor:

Thanks largely to the infamous Immersion Corporation patent making it too expensive for most consumer brands to ship FFB flight sticks since the late 90s (I might write a whole issue about this story one day, it’s fascinating), there has been a gulf in Force Feedback capabilities between the consumer sim racing scene and the consumer flight sim scene.

With the launch of their new rudder pedals, Moza is the first brand ever to host a full, FFB line-up of sim racing and flight sim hardware.

Of course, I’m not discounting the fact that Logitech and Thrustmaster have both had flight and racing sim hardware on sale for decades, but neither have ever integrated FFB into their flight sim equipment.

I don’t suppose Moza will be the last to achieve this milestone. Thrustmaster and Logitech have both dominated the entry-level flight sim market for over a decade and I expect they’ll follow suit in the coming years.

If you’ve ever listened to the monthly Traxion.gg podcast (re-launching V soon!), you’ll know that I am a huge fan of flight sims, particularly when using VR. I’m a bit of a history nerd, and enjoy nothing more than sitting in the cockpit of a Spitfire Mk IX, monitoring my Ts&Ps, referring to my map and keeping station on the wing tip of the plane next to me as we fly over the white cliffs of Dover in formation at the start a 60 minute sortie to hunt Jerry.

So, how many of us are sim agnostic? How many of us are sim generalists? How many regularly swap between the tarmac and the skies?

We love machinery and we love simulation. Clearly, building a sim rig is an important and cultural part of the sim racers journey, as it is for the budding flight simmer. So, as sim racers, we share a lot of DNA with our cousins in the flight sim world.

Love it or hate it, your average 80/20 aluminium profile rig can easily be adjusted to host wheelbases and yolks, handbrakes and throttles, pedals and… pedals. Aluminium profile and the rise of the “ecosystem” may pave the way for even greater crossover, which I think is a great thing for retention in our industry.

Having an open ecosystem creates an environment where, once you’ve rage quit one too many times after being “punterino’d” from the track at turn 1 at Monza, rather than head to eBay to sell up and move on from this dastardly sport, you could instead change tack and explore the serenity of a Cessna flight across the Grand Canyon, or drop a stick of blood-thirsty warriors into a hot LZ.

The point is this: I believe we might see a general shift among some parts of the market from “sim racers” to just “simmers” when sim racers realise they already have a lot of the constituent parts of a great flight sim rig at home whilst at the same time, their wheelbase manufacturer starts marketing yolks, joysticks and rudder pedals to them.

We are already seeing this with the perhaps more obvious crossover between farm and truck simulators. I know gamers who will spend an hour driving the wheels off of a GT3 before heading off to tend their crops whilst never leaving their seat.

Given the similarities in the technology, might we see more and more sim racing hardware manufacturers jump on this trend and broaden their appeal with more flight equipment?

Built by Driver61 (Scott Mansell), Trophi.ai is trying to do just that. We’ve all been there, we get a couple of hours to dust of the rig and jump into some ranked sessions, but this week the track is one we’re unfamiliar with. Trophi.ai will help you get up to speed faster, with live, AI-powered voice coaching.

Brake a little later here, get back on the power a little later there… you know the drill

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If you’ve ever read a Traxion.gg article, you’ll know that the writers over here all have very distinct voices and opinions. It’s this character and sound that I think makes Traxion special.

Human creation is becoming a rare commodity with which the media seem to trade less and less. But not at Traxion. We don’t use AI to write our articles on the website, and I pledge to you, that I will never use AI to write this newsletter.