Kerbolnaut

I'm now seeing a new error message when I attempt to view recent changes. There's a backtrace with the included message at the top: " A database query error has occurred. Did you forget to run your application's database schema updater after upgrading?"

I'm seeing a similar problem. I can view most pages on the wiki, but I am unable to log in and some pages are inaccessible. For example, recent changes states a database query error occurred. The same type of error occurs after I try to log in.

The wiki has been getting barraged by spambots over the last two and a half days. They've made 17 user accounts and 300+ new pages of pure spam. I've been consistently blanking their spam but I can't actually delete the spam pages or ban the spammers. UmbralRaptor has banned nine of them, KasperVld got one, but there's still seven left unbanned at this point. I'm not even sure it matters because they just pop up new accounts like dandelions and continue at it. There's also still around 300 pages of blanked spam that have yet to be deleted, and I'm guessing there's going to be another 70-150 new pages that I'll need to blank tomorrow. If anyone with delete and ban privileges on the wiki is reading this, please take a look at KasperVld's talk page to see the list of account that still haven't been banned. I've also listed all of the spam accounts, so the pages that still need to be deleted can be found in their contributions sections. Keeping up with the spam is getting tiring, and I'm hoping that we can increase spam restrictions on the wiki, possibly by asking users easy questions about the game whenever they want to create a new page. Does anyone have any other ideas?

Maybe make it so that while brakes are toggled on, they are automatically applied at the opposite of your thrust toggle? 0% thrust = 100% brakes, 75% thrust = 25% brakes, etc. This could be very handy when landing a spaceplane, since airbrakes should be more effective as you go faster, and less effective as you go slower, but engine thrust is constant. It would make it so that you'd rapidly speed up or slow down to a certain equilibrium speed whenever you change the throttle settings, so when your brakes are on your throttle would act like a speed controller rather than just acting strictly as an accelerator.

Design: It definitely helps to make a wide lander. I usually make landers with three radially-decoupled fuel tanks and small engines around the return module. I place the lander legs on the decoupled fuel tanks so that the lander has a wide stance which can safely tolerate shallow slopes. It also helps to keep your lander short so that it has a low center of gravity, and that's easier to do when the spare fuel is kept to the sides rather than vertically. Planning: It's usually a good idea to establish a low orbit and swing around once or twice to scope out possible landing sites. It's also generally best to attempt landings on the current daytime side so that you'll have good illumination to help you spot slopes and avoid them early on. Piloting: If you've picked out a landing site that seemed okay, but looks sloped when you get closer to it, then it's best to fire up the engines and move a little bit so you can get a safer landing site. Apollo 11 had to do exactly this when Neil Armstrong noticed that their intended landing site actually had a lot of boulders strewn about, so he was forced to make the landing a short distance away from the original target. As always, make sure to get rid of horizontal velocity before trying to go down to the surface. Have SAS on (and RCS if available) in the last few seconds before you touch down so that rotation induced by the landing can be minimized. Recovery: If you've done your very best to avoid tipping on the landing but you still find that you're about to tip over, you should immediately go to full throttle to bounce yourself away from the surface. You'll most likely need to correct a tumble, and you'll often have less than 30 seconds to do it. If you don't maintain full control during the bounce, you should kill the throttle as soon as the lander is aimed more down than up, then stabilize your lander, give yourself a short burn upwards to buy some extra time, correct any horizontal velocity you might have picked up and try again. When in doubt, just remember that it's always safer and less expensive to retrieve kerbals from orbit than it is to retrieve them from the surface of a planet or moon. As such, don't worry too much about wasting a little fuel on the landing - it's better to err on the side of caution and get the landing right.

Go to 100,000X warp and it will look like 0.05 m/s^2 of gravity on the surface, which is equal to the surface gravity of Gilly at 1X warp.

Exactly. This is not a bug. When you build your rocket, you have to look at those little arrows/triangles on the decoupler. They point at the side where it will decouple. Decouplers only disconnect one side, while stack separators disconnect both sides. Use a decoupler when separating stages of a rocket. Use a separator if you have two separate spacecraft that you want to break apart.

Ah, left click does the trick! Thank you!

I don't have anything blocking the entrance. I did a simple test with just a Mk 1-2 command pod placed on top of a science lab module. I tried starting it off with two kerbals inside the science lab and couldn't get them out, so I tried having two kerbals EVA down the ladder into the science lab and couldn't get them out either.

Does that work for you? I tried that, but it didn't work for me. I usually have no problems getting crew out of modules, so I'm not sure why the science lab module seems different.

After some experimentation, it seems possible to get crew into the science lab module either by placing them there before launch, or by having them enter it like any other module. However, regardless of how they get into it, I can't seem to get them out. Is there a way to do it, or do science modules always have to return to Kerbin to recover their crew?

Are you sure you're building your aircraft in the spaceplane hangar? You could definitely have this problem if you were building your plane in the VAB instead of the hangar.

Oxygen is not a concern in KSP so far, and speed won't kill Kerbals as long as you're not slamming them into solid objects at high speeds. Your problem is very unusual, so you'll need to offer some more details.

That's actually easy to deal with in planetary orbit. As long as you're in an equatorial orbit, just point the target docking port north or south. North and south will stay the same direction as the ship rotates around the planet's equator.

To takeoff at a lower speed, tilt your wings upward slightly. Wings in KSP act like flat boards, you have to angle them against the wind to get any lift. To deal with stability, you'll want your center of lift behind your center of mass. Also, try turning on precision control and have SAS on at all times (or almost all times). I can sometimes get away with the center of lift being a little bit ahead of the center of mass when I use precision controls and SAS. To deal with going fast enough to reach orbit, you'll probably want 8 or more ram air intakes, and not too much heavy rocket fuel (your rocket fuel payload looks excessive). Right now, drag is more or less proportional to mass, so that heavy rocket fuel adds a lot of drag that you don't need. You'll only need about 1/2 to 1/4 of that to achieve a stable orbit when you're going fast enough and high enough on jet engines. Basically, the approach that I use is to get up to about 32K and build up speed. I carefully maintain my altitude at 32K until my speed is above 1,700 m/s, and preferably 2,200 m/s if I'm still gaining speed at a reasonable pace. When I'm going about as fast as I can go at 32K, I'll gently increase my altitude and I'll throttle down the engines when the oxygen reserve is low to avoid a flameout. Gradually, I'll get to higher altitudes and velocities and I'll end up on a trajectory that will take me briefly out of the atmosphere. I'll continue running my engines as long as I can to maintain my speed, and then I'll close my intakes and coast into orbit. I'll switch to the rocket engine and gently use it to maintain enough speed to reach an apoapsis of 100K or so. At the apoapsis, I'll gently burn into a stable orbit.