Fearless Son

If you've been to the Mun and back, then you can go to Minmus. It's a lot more forgiving and requires less delta-V to land and return to Kerbin than the Mun, it just requires somewhat more delta-V (and a better understanding of orbital inclination) to get too it in the first place. That in mind, my advice is to use whatever you already have with the standard recommendation of "Moar Boosters!" It sounds flippant, but it genuinely is something that will help in this. You need to front-load your delta-V in this mission since you require so little by the time you get there. Adding more boosters to your launch stage will get it up in orbit with more delta-V to spare for matching Minmus' orbital inclination and a substantial portion of your transfer burn.

Awesome! Just be careful if you try to aerobreak. Eve is, uh, pretty unforgiving compared to Kerbin and Duna.

I'll use Sepratrons if the empty boosters are pretty massive to give it that little extra "oomph" the decoupler's can't quite manage, but most of the time I don't really need them if they've been properly placed and balanced. I also usually make sure to throttle down a bit before detachment, then go full throttle just as I activate the staging. Usually does enough to get the main body out from the middle of the boosters before they risk turning back on it.

Alex up there summarizing my opinion on docking mods, but don't let my opinion stop you. Sounds like you're struggling a lot with the RCS part of docking. One of my recommendations is to learn when to alternate between RCS and SAS. You almost never want them on at the same time while docking, and you might find one working against the other. But switching between the two can make things a lot less frustrating. For my part, I only use RCS when translating (moving backward and forward or laterally) while I only ever use reaction wheels to change orientation (direction of the craft.) That way, I don't waste monopropellant trying to turn or introduce "wobble" in the translation from oddly placed RCS thrusters messing up my translation with micro-pushes. The process is mostly one of translate, rotate, translate, rotate, translate, rotate, repeatedly until docked. It sounds like you have the rendezvous down if you can regularly get within fifty meters of your target, so getting lined up with it and moving in sounds like your big challenge. I assume you are right-clicking on the port you want to dock with and doing "Set As Target"? That gives you a more precise thing to aim for when moving in. You should also right-click the docking port on your own craft and select "Control From Here" so your navigation tools know that is the part you want to use as the "nose" of the craft. Further, if the other craft is controllable (i.e. it has a probe core or a pilot aboard) and has its own reaction wheels, then I find it's worthwhile to switch to that craft with ] or [, then set the first craft's docking port as it's target, control from the port you want to dock it to, and rotate it around until it's lined up with the incoming craft. Then switch back to that craft and bring it in. This is much, much easier than trying to translate one craft around another until it lines up with the desired docking port. Oh, and one last thing, once you have the craft lined up and close together, turn off the SAS. This is important. The docking clamps have some magnets in them that will line them up with each other if they're close together, but the force of those magnets are pretty weak and will be overwhelmed by an SAS system trying to keep the craft "stable" instead of letting the magnets pull it into alignment, and you may end up bouncing off.

I find that's actually one of the places where I am least likely to use auto-struts, but it has a lot more to do with my preference for very carefully manually strutting radial boosters. Mostly this is because auto-strut tends to attach to center-of-mass, and I very intentionally make sure my radial boosters have a pair of attachment points that are in axial alignment with respect to each other but are balanced across the center rather than right in the middle of it. Specifically, the separator attachment is near the front of the booster, while the strut is near the rear of the booster to stabilize it. That way when the boosters detach, they peel away starting from the top instead of from the middle, which is helped if they have any aerodynamic stabilizers near their rear. This, I find, helps avoid problems with the boosters knocking into each other or the lifting vehicle as they detach, causing a Rapid Unplanned Disassembly during ascent. Plus it looks really cool.

I can't say I've ever used those cargo bays, despite using the Mk. 2 Lander Can. Mostly I end up stripping the sides off of it entirely and just mounting what I need to mount on it's slimmer sides, then using a fairing to occlude drag issues on the way up.

I tried the tutorial, which was mostly trying to tell me how to stabilize a tumbling capsule in orbit without S.A.S. and with only RCS thrusters (this was before the game had reaction-wheels, when those parts only function was to let you turn S.A.S. on.) Gave up on that pretty quick. I think the first thing I tried on my own was launching an ion-driven communication satellite into LKO. The ion drive was so weak it couldn't circularize though, and my launch vehicle was both overbuilt and under powered.

I meant it has a benefit over pure RCS thrusters due to having an adjustable throttle. Makes for easier soft vacuum landings. There is one benefit it has over LFO engines though, and that is that it doesn't require any fuel flow connection. Now, that's not much of a benefit, considering how the game currently handles fuel, but it can be handy if you don't want to fuss about which nozzle is draining from which tank.

The Puff might (might!) be a little more useful in low gravity landing situations, due to it's throttlability. I sometimes use them for "land a new surface station on Minmus" contracts where I expect the trip to be on-way and I don't need a lot of delta-v. A small monopropellant tank and a Puff or two usually gets a smallish module down pretty easily.

I can see why you would, but I didn't enjoy that mission much myself, so I don't really have good memories associated with that music. Mission: "You're going to need to flow low and very steady to remain focused on these targets." Me: "Okay, I'll take an A-10 since I need something stable at low speed that can absorb some damage instead of break off if it comes to it." Mission: "Ha-ha, just kidding! Hope you can fly real high really fast!"

"Daredevil" is probably the most epic piece from that soundtrack, but "Sol Squadron" is probably more appropriate to the fighter in the screenshot. Either that, or "Archange". "There are Kerbals like you in every generation, and I've launched every last one of them..."

"The battery was a lithium thionyl chloride nonrechargeable. I figured that out from some subtle clues: the shape of the connection points, the thickness of the insulation, and the fact that it had "LiSOCl2 NON-RCHRG" written on it." - Mark Watney, The Martian

"Rocket Royale".

Simple descriptive names. Usually of the [Destination] [Function] [Craft Type] format. For example, "Mun Science Lander", or "Duna Communication Satellite". It's very dry. On rare occasions I might get a little more creative. For example, I had a vessel that was designed to extract ore on the Mun. It was propelled by a pair of Vector engines mounted on either side of it, and their high thrust and high gimble range caused the craft to "wobble" a bit back and forth in flight as it kept correcting itself. Because of this characteristic, I nicknamed it the "Duck Driller", because it reminded me of how duck's look when they walk.

The prophecy has been fulfilled! (Because this scene from Serenity is so damn Kerbal): Wash: Well, if she doesn't get us some extra flow from the engine room to offset the burn-through, this landing is gonna get pretty interesting. Mal: Define "interesting"? Wash: [deadpan] "Oh, God, oh, God, we're all gonna die"? Mal: [over intercom] This is the captain. We have a little problem with our entry sequence, so we may experience some slight turbulence and then... explode. Mal: [to Wash] Just... get us to the ground. Wash: Of that I'm fairly certain!

Yeah, that video was indeed awesome (I'm going to try and imitate the rotational mechanism) but the first place my thought went was with the Hermes from The Martian: Similar long radiator panels, similar front docking airlock.

This has to be one of the most plausible interplanetary ship designs I have ever seen.

Now I have an image of a Kerbal posing in my head and saying, "In the name of the Mun, I shall punish you!"

Oh my, I can hear that GIF. It sounds like this:

I noticed that you had a bunch of RCS nozzles on the bottom of the rover. Do you have similar nozzles on the top? This may be a marginal in Duna's gravity, but I have noticed that increasing the down force on the wheels helps translate more of their power to locomotion for the rover. So if you have some upward-thrusting capacity on the rover, you can temporarily activate that to push the rover more firmly into the ground, which will result in more greater wheel traction and help it climb slopes a little easier.

In my admittedly weak defense, I didn't even notice the typo until just now. Back to space travel! I just like the idea of having lots of open-space on the interior of the craft as part of the quality-of-life of long-term habitation. Since we don't have to contend with things like aerodynamic or aquadymanic considerations as we would for planet-bound vessels, we can make them as arbitrarily large volume as we want, assuming the overall mass is still reasonable.

They remind me of visiting the aquarium when I was a kid. They would have large tanks for large aquatic creatures, with convex windows you could lean into and peer out into the water on multiple sides. The cupola modules feel like that.

Per the other suggestions, raise the apoapsis, then at apoapsis lower the periapsis to somewhere in the low atmosphere. Lots of speed, lots of thick air to burn up against. While you are at it, I would also recommend sending your station into a rapid spin as you are approaching the atmosphere, then cut off any SAS. Even small reaction wheels will get it spinning at a high speed, if you let them run long enough. The purpose of this is that it tends to spread out the atmospheric compression across the surface of the station, instead of letting just one part take the brunt of it. This will delay the heat build up in some places, dragging the process out so it doesn't blow up too quickly, and hopefully giving you lots of nice smaller explosions instead of one big one that takes everything else with it. You might also get some of the looser parts of the station getting ripped off without exploding as the combination of torque and shearing forces tear weakly held chunks off of it. Think the ending scene of Gravity:

Is that a rotary cannon made up of rotary cannons? Yo dawg, we heard you like rotating gun barrels...

That was @NovaSilisko's original intent, as I understand it: