Best HOTAS & HOSAS for Star Citizen
This guide contains affiliate links — we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Verdicts are written before affiliate status is checked for any product.
Star Citizen is the sim that broke the old HOTAS assumption. A throttle quadrant makes sense when your ship mostly flies forwards like an aircraft; a space sim with full six-degrees-of-freedom strafing rewards something else — a second stick. That is why the community splits into HOTAS (hands on throttle and stick) and HOSAS (hands on stick and stick) camps, and why vJoy, Joystick Gremlin and HidHide became part of the standard Star Citizen control stack. This guide explains the twin-stick logic first, then the setups worth buying at each level.
Why two sticks work in space
In atmosphere, thrust is roughly one-dimensional: a throttle lever is the natural control. In Star Citizen you strafe up, down, left and right as much as you surge forwards, and those translation axes want spring-centred, instant, proportional control in your left hand — exactly what a stick gives and a throttle lever does not. The typical HOSAS layout puts strafe and surge on the left stick, pitch, roll and yaw on the right, with boost, brakes and coupled-mode toggles on the grips’ buttons. Pilots who switch from throttle to twin-stick for dogfighting rarely switch back, though many keep a throttle too for cruising, mining and salvaging, where a set-and-forget lever is genuinely more relaxing.
Whichever hardware you choose, the software stack matters as much: vJoy provides the virtual devices, Joystick Gremlin merges and curves them, and HidHide hides the raw hardware from the game so it sees one clean layout. Our Star Citizen setup guide in the games section walks that chain step by step, and the download page has the vJoy build you need.
The enthusiast answer: twin VKB Gladiators
Ask the HOSAS community what to buy and the twin VKB Gladiator setup is the consensus answer — most famously a right-hand Gladiator NXT EVO paired with the left-hand Omni Throttle variant, whose angled grip is shaped specifically to work as a space throttle-stick hybrid. Contactless sensing, a grip dense with hats and buttons, and a gimbal that stays precise under dogfighting loads make it the setup competitive pilots standardise on. Two of them cost real money, and VKB stock comes and goes by region.
The disclosure, again, because it is the point of this site: VKB has no public affiliate programme. We recommend twin Gladiators because the community’s best pilots fly them and the hardware earns it, not because the recommendation pays. Buy through VKB’s official regional stores or a marketplace listing at a sane price, and be wary of marked-up resellers.
VKB Gladiator NXT EVO — check current price
The HOSAS benchmark, singly or as a twin-stick pair. Check marketplace price against VKB’s official store.
The complete-kit answer: Logitech X52 / X52 Pro
If you want one box, one purchase and a classic HOTAS layout that Star Citizen fully supports, the Logitech X52 remains the default recommendation, with the X52 Pro as its sturdier, all-black sibling. You get a separate throttle unit with a detent feel that suits cruising and quantum travel, a stick with plenty of buttons and modes, and — underrated — more community-shared Star Citizen profiles than for any other device. The trade is the one described above: a throttle lever is a weaker strafe control than a left stick, so committed dogfighters outgrow it, while explorers, haulers and miners may never want anything else.
Logitech X52 HOTAS — check current price
The classic one-box HOTAS for Star Citizen, with a deep library of community profiles.
The budget twin-stick answer: dual T.16000M
The cheapest credible HOSAS setup is two Thrustmaster T.16000M sticks. The ambidextrous grip design is the enabler here — the same stick genuinely works in either hand — and the contactless main-axis sensing keeps precision respectable at a pair price well below the enthusiast tier. The known caveat is the twist axis, which is the wear point on this model; in a twin-stick layout both twists carry yaw and strafe duties, so heavy users should budget for the possibility of an early replacement or a future pedal addition from our pedals guide. As a way to test whether HOSAS suits you before committing to VKB money, nothing else comes close.
Thrustmaster T.16000M FCS — check current price
Buy two for the budget HOSAS setup: ambidextrous grips and contactless main axes.
A note on the VelocityOne Flightdeck
Turtle Beach’s VelocityOne line is the name MSFS yoke pilots know, and its Flightdeck HOTAS is the part of that range Star Citizen players ask us about. It is a legitimate single-stick-plus-throttle option with a modern, button-rich throttle unit, and readers already inside the Turtle Beach ecosystem will find it the coherent choice. For a dedicated Star Citizen dogfighting build we still rank twin sticks above any HOTAS here — that is a layout judgement, not a quality one — but as a mixed Star Citizen and flight-sim HOTAS, the Flightdeck deserves a look at Turtle Beach’s own store.
Turtle Beach VelocityOne — official store
Turtle Beach’s flight range, including the Flightdeck HOTAS, at the official store.
Our verdict
Decide the layout before the brand. Pure dogfighting and full 6DOF control point to HOSAS: twin VKB Gladiators if the budget allows, dual T.16000M if it does not. Mixed play — hauling, mining, exploration with occasional combat — is honestly better served by the X52’s throttle-and-stick comfort and its ocean of shared profiles. And whichever you buy, leave room in the budget and the desk for the unglamorous parts of the stack: the software chain is free via our download page, and head tracking from our head-tracking comparison will change your Star Citizen situational awareness more than the jump between any two sticks in this guide.