Hi Henriks,
I had been thinking the same. Nevertheless, to be used in a realistic way, you should remove all the springs of the controller (so that the sticks stay in position). The small size of the stick will still have another problem : it'll we hard to keep a neutral position. But that may still be interesting (especially for water jet ships, that are actually driven by joysticks, like the red jet or the catamaran in SSE) ....