What are all the things you can do with a joystick when you are at the helm?

Fly the ship...

I find using a joystick and keyboard together greatly increases how quickly I can maneouvre the ship and how accurately I can place the ship in combat. There are only a couple of functions a joystick will control: increase and decrease impulse speed, turn the ship port and starboard, engage warp (1 - 4). I am sure if I programmed it a little I could include other functions like engage reverse impulse or zoom in and out on the console; along with maneouvring and speed change, reverse and zoom are the functions I use most in combat.

I have developed a particular style of flying and without using a joystick, I would have to adapt how I fly as it would be too difficult otherwise. It does allow me to fly in a much more dynamic way (with the help of a good Engineer of course!)

It allows you to turn and to increase impulse. Mine can acitvate warp as well for some reasons. Depends on what buttons you have.

The following is my setup from the controls.ini file. It has all the functions I've made work. Mind you not all of the bindings actually work the functions are there.

ANALOG_THROTTLE = UI_INPUT_JOY0_AXIS2

JOY_WARP_1 = UI_INPUT_JOY0_BUTT4
JOY_WARP_2 = UI_INPUT_JOY0_BUTT5
JOY_WARP_3 = UI_INPUT_JOY0_BUTT6
JOY_WARP_4 = UI_INPUT_JOY0_BUTT7

HELM_TOGGLE_REVERSE = UI_INPUT_JOY0_BUTT8
HELM_REQUEST_DOCK = UI_INPUT_JOY0_BUTT9
TOGGLE_SHIELDS = UI_INPUT_JOY0_BUTT2

MAIN_SCREEN_FRONT = UI_INPUT_JOY0_HATUP
MAIN_SCREEN_LEFT = UI_INPUT_JOY0_HATLEFT
MAIN_SCREEN_RIGHT = UI_INPUT_JOY0_HATRIGHT
MAIN_SCREEN_REAR = UI_INPUT_JOY0_HATDOWN
MAIN_SCREEN_TACTICAL = UI_INPUT_JOY0_BUTT0
MAIN_SCREEN_SECTOR = UI_INPUT_JOY0_BUTT1
MAIN_SCREEN_STATUS = UI_INPUT_JOY0_BUTT3