Forum Discussion
Elite Dangerous and Squadron's mouse controls are not virtual joystick by default. Virtual joystick means that left and right movement = roll not yaw. Elite Dangerous can be re-mapped to be virtual joystick, but default left and right mouse is yaw. In Squadrons you can't even re-map it to get roll on mouse.
Real virtual joystick is like Battlefield 4. In that game if you want to use the mouse to pitch up or down, you have to continuously move the mouse (a pita imo, you have to use a second bind for pitch up at least). If you stop moving the mouse the jet will center, emulating how a joystick will re-center itself once input is stopped. In Squadrons it doesn't center itself. If you leave the mouse off center the ship will continuously pitch/yaw. This is nothing like virtual joystick and no this is not the standard. Some games like Elite are close to this though.
tldr: Virtual joystick means that left and right mouse movement are roll. It also means that once input is stopped (the mouse stops moving) the ship will center. Squadrons uses a tethered mouse control mode that does neither of these.