Reactordrone

I used to do bulk trips just outside Kerbin's sphere of influence to level up crews before going interplanetary but with the ability to level up on the fly with the MPL there's less need since I'm usually sending a lab on any planetary trips.

Repair kits are small and can be stacked so although you only have two slots you can cram four repair kits into one of them. Your engineer should then be able to fix the array.

In order to get maximum thrust from the rapiers you need to be going fast. Try leveling off or even going into a shallow dive at about 5000m to pick up speed. Once over mach 1 the engine thrust will start to rise and you can pull the nose back up a bit to climb out. Air breathing thrust will die at just over 20km so pick up most of your speed at 10-15 km.

You can load struts into a cargo container and fly an engineer up to attach them if you're keen. (click the crane hook for construction options when you're on EVA)

Performed in space the EVA experiment is trying to spin a wing nut. If you don't have the jetpack turned on the kerbal will spin and the nut stays still. if the jetack is turned on you can spin the nut and are treated to a view of the Dzhanibekov effect.

If you have anything else open besides the fuel tanks you won't get the fuel transfer options, so if you click open two fuel tanks and a science instrument or a command module your transfer options disappear.

It may be that the second stage fins are causing the top of the rocket to try to flip if the vehicle gets too far off prograde. If the second stage cannot fly straight without fins you may be ditching the first stage too low in the atmosphere. A rebalance of the vehicles delta-v may be called for so that staging occurs higher up (say above 25km).

It will depend a little on your thrust to weight ratio and flight profile but in general you want to launch before the station gets to your position, roughly when it reaches the western shore of the continent where the space centre is. If you launch a bit early you just increase your apoapsis to rendezvous. If you launch late keep your apoapsis low to catch up.

If your lander isn't returning to Kerbin you can ditch the parachute and heat shield.

I guess a simple way would be to have a target dV (4000m/s in vacuum for example) and add ore tanks in the VAB and fill them until the delta-v reaches that target. Check that your lift off TWR is reasonable and test fly to verify. Not sure why your upper stage fuel would need to be lowered for TWR since that's going to vary depending on payload and can be quite low with long burning first stages like the atlas has.

To do it in a single burn you basically want to keep raising your apoapsis so that it stays just in front of your current position. This will generally require very low thrust and you won't be able to time warp up to apoapse.

The clouds parted for about an hour around sunset so managed to get a shot of the conjunction, https://imgur.com/gallery/pcDp20S

If there's a red x next to the part requirement the game doesn't think you have that part. I'd check that first.

As I understand it you can't have loops in vehicle construction so only one set of docking ports can attach.

Just tested a ship with no other means of directional control and they seemed to work fine.