Was going to post this in the Hard Light forums, but the registration page rejected me for being "a spam" and telling me to contact the administrator, and after like half an hour of looking around I was unable to find a way to do that without having a registered account, so screw them.

I got a CH Products Fighterstick and I want to play Freespace 2 with it. It was recommended to me as an ideal game for getting used to and learning to use a joystick. The main problem I've got with it is that the flight dynamics are incorrectly set, it seems that in most games you have pitch on the up-down axis and roll on the left-right axis, but in Freespace Open it defaults to yaw on the left-right axis. Went into the options menu and attempted to fix this, but the game doesn't seem to detect he input. I double click on the binding for what I guess is the roll function (the flight dynamics were all weirdly named in the options menu for some reason) and move the joystick around and it won't set it, it only works if I hit a button or key, it won't pick up the axis. It is actually functioning and detecting the input in game, I was able to fly around in the very first tutorial mission fine with the incorrectly set dynamics, but I can't seem to rebind them. Not much point in using this game to learn to dogfight if I learn it with the wrong controls.

So you can set buttons on the joystick, but not the axes? Weird ...

But as to your query: space sims and flight sims differ - in flight sims, roll/bank is indeed on the left-right axis and yaw (rudder) is on the twist (if your joystick has a twist). For a lot of space sims the default is yaw on left-right and roll on twist. This makes sense because few atmospheric planes turn all that well by rudder (only a couple of WWI planes really) - the best turn you get is by banking and pulling. Most space sims though have no differential maneuvering between the various axis so rolling is only to get yourself oriented (i.e. re-orient your weapons with respect to a target) or to do some maneuvers (i.e. rolls). Simple turning is most often done by yaw. It is annoying that you can't reset to your liking, but neither control scheme is necessarily wrong. Hopefully someone else will have a solution to your axes-setting problem.