FancyMouse

Really depends on my patience. When I do have patience, I will design a really low TWR plane for maximum efficiency. That usually ends up having to dive from 8km to 7km for breaking transonic drag. When I don't have patience, then I just slam more engines and keep constant 10 degree AoA to send it to space.

It's not just water. It's literally almost everything - once you passed triple point (low pressure in here), liquid no longer exists.

Stock aero also models body lift. F12 and look for cyan arrows.

Flooding in KSC seem to spill out to space.

Are you sure you have a control point (probe core/pod/docking port) facing front of the rover? Did you try to press A when your navball looks pure cyan?

It does. It marks a red cross on the surface for your landing spot, which is not necessary at the end of your trajectory path. The path doesn't take rotation into account, but the red cross does. I don't have KSP right in front of me so I don't remember for sure if this one is an optional setting or not, but the red cross is definitely there for quite a long while and I've been using it a lot.

The font of the ship name and the version of KER is pretty alarming. You might be running an early version of KSP where all the above arguments might be invalid. That KER version seems to run on 1.0.* and IIRC 1.0.* contain a lot of heat and atmosphere changes (I remember a few of the versions it's extremely hard to enter Eve atmosphere where it was changed to be a bit easier later). So the best way is to test yourself.

What? I thought RL is a distraction from Kerbal.

Putting Nerv engines at the back is pretty challenging for spaceplanes because they easily pull CoM backwards, making it harder to adjust CoM and CoL. I guess your case is simply CoL gets in front of CoM. In thinner atmo, other stuff can still overcome aerodynamics, but when air gets thicker, you will lose control. In some sense, I think the plane isn't really properly designed for horizontal flight.

1. Make sure you're doing a Hohmann transfer (i.e. arriving in about 10 days). Any other time will increase capture delta V required. Not all 930 m/s maneuvers are the same. 2. Make sure your Minmus periapsis is within 20km. That's when burn is most effective (Oberth effect). If there's still problem, better post a picture for better investigation.

I usually start targeting docking port at a distance about 10-20m. 60m seems too far to click on any small parts on the target ship.

The biggest benefit of this plan is when there's a large inclination when ejecting. This method can correct inclination at apoapsis with minimal fuel, and then you can just burn prograde to eject, saving about up to a hundred m/s or so if the original burn (e.g. suggested by TWP) is like 2km/s prograde and 1km/s normal. It also allows an extra stage if one doesn't want to leave space debris. I do this plan a lot when leaving for Jool from Kerbin directly, for example. It's pretty useless for helping super-low TWR ejection - the 1km/s to burn to edge of SoI is usually less than half of the total dV required (I assume by using Ions you would want to go somewhere further than Duna/Eve). So the final ejection still burns more than half the delta V, which doesn't make the situation any more reasonable.

It's ok to put gears on the wings. In fact, it has automatic strutting that probably already implicitly did what other people suggested. But this kind of gear-on-wing setup puts a demand on descent rate, i.e. you'll need a slower rate of descent upon landing not to break anything. And if it breaks like you said, you typically need to land more gently (don't tell me you approach at -10m/s or even more steep). A pair of biggest gear is enough to handle half fuel of 75t takeoff weight plane (I have one of 100t takeoff weight on a pair of biggest gear on wings and it still lands normally).

Make good use of root tool (which works for inactive part tree as well), and shift click (which can tear apart inactive part tree). Anything that inactive parts can't attach - you go with the previous two methods. Subassembly is a management nightmare. Subassembly itself is stored per-save, but the categorization is stored globally (for each game). Every time you want to move stuff across game installs, or you move around the sandbox/career save for whatever reason, something is going to screwed up. So I use Merge craft exclusively, with the two methods above. Works just how it should work for me.

Interstage fairing never satisfies me in terms of the room inside, so I usually end up with just surface attaching cubic struts and start building from there. It usually ends up something looking peculiar and draggy, but at least it gets the job done.