bewing

Apologies, but you are about to run into one of the limitations of the game. It's a clever and cute ship, and if it were possible to grab an asteroid in multiple places at the same time, it would probably work fairly nicely. However, it doesn't really work like that. If you design a couple of craft with docking ports perfectly, and then fly them perfectly, you can get multiple docking ports to attach simultaneously. But klaws never do. And you aren't even trying to get them to attach at the same time. The way the additional arms work will depend on your "self interaction" setting for this craft. Because once the first klaw attaches to the asteroid, then the asteroid becomes just one more part on your craft. And a klaw on a craft will not attach to itself. It'll either pass through itself (meaning the asteroid in this case), or it will just bounce off. But the reality is that if you want to grab an asteroid and not have the joint bend, then you should just use one klaw and then add an autostrut after you lock the joint.

Spricigo kinda gave you a big hint: your engine mount is very draggy. An additional hint for Eve is that anything on your craft that is not absolutely required for your return trip to kerbin should be discardable on Eve with decouplers. Which means, things like all but one of your solar panels. It's perhaps smarter to have one big and one tiny solar panel -- that makes it easier to discard the big one. But as far as determining drag and minimizing it, you do it by building airplane after airplane on Kerbin with different parts, and test flying them, and then judging their top speed and acceleration capabilities. Stock KSP is all about teaching you to do engineering by doing, rather than by feeding you numbers to analyze.

Nah. It's fine. Sometime offset parts will cause problems if you have "self-interaction" turned on for that vessel. But in this case, I really doubt that you have it turned on in the first place (there is no reason to) and your part is not clipped into any other part -- it's just offset sideways a little. It may even fix itself the next time you load the game or the vessel.

Where is this going to be landed? Generally when the suspension goes crazy, it's because you've got too much suspension (as in too many wheels for the local gravity). Can you remove some wheels, fill it full, then teleport it and test it on your favorite moon?

There is a second kind of "recovery" contract, that applies here. Sometimes you are asked to recover a part from somewhere, and to land it safely on Kerbin. You can use a klaw, a decoupler, a couple parachutes, and some structural parts. You use the klaw to dock to the part you want to recover, activate the parachutes, lower your Pe until everything will enter the atmosphere, then decouple the thing, then maybe recircularize your parent craft, then switch to the other craft and watch it reenter and land safely. This will complete your kerbal rescue contract. As Vanamonde said, you can also forget the decoupler, and try to land the whole mess -- that's significantly harder.

I assume it's an asteroid of some type? I would think you could name it something funny, mark it as "being tracked", and then look in the Tracking Station.

Yeah, I'm sticking with what I said on Spricigo's thread.

Did you turn on your RCS? You often need that to maintain pitch control in the stratosphere.

Pitch up to 90 degrees. You want drag. That's how you do it. The faster you slow down, the less heating you will get. And the heating will be on your wings, and not your nose.

There is no such thing as "proper progression". The function of the Explore contracts is simply to give you a new target and an incentive. Once you get to Eve, your next target may be the Mun.

The way that the "ground" works in games is that when a part of your vehicle is below the ground, the game engine forces it back above the ground with some small upward velocity. Things do not actually ever "rest" on the surface. Due to the transmission of stresses and strains to other parts in a multipart craft, this causes unbalanced rotational or translational forces. Which causes a slow rotation or translation. I call this "microbouncing". I don't think it can ever be completely fixed for a particular craft. However, using the wrong sized wheels or the wrong spring values will make it worse. Which implies that sometimes fiddling with your choice of wheels on the craft, or their spring values can moderately improve the situation.

I often use a single pair for a 40 tonne spaceplane. So 3 might be enough. 5 is certainly enough -- provided your design has ample wing incidence, the CoM and CoL relatively close, no preset downforce, etc. etc..

"Veering to the left" off the runway is a very common design problem. In fact, it's so common that it's listed in the FAQ on this particular forum. Unfortunately, there are dozens of possible technical issues that can cause this behavior. And each has its own fix. However, IMO the most common problem is that there is too much "ground drag" on the front wheel. One of the lessons of KSP is that to have passive stability (in the air or on the ground), you need low drag at the front, and higher drag at the back. If your problem is ground drag, then the cure is to switch the "Friction Control" on your front wheel to Manual, and then reduce it down to .6 or less.

High TWR engines are heavy (and expensive), so they waste fuel and money. And once they get into the upper atmosphere or space, they have a lower Isp than the low-thrust engines -- so they are not efficient, either. So, a 1.5 to 2.5 TWR tends to be a reasonable compromise. Especially if you stage away your launch engine when you are halfway to space.

First, you need to go into Settings, and activate the "Show Advanced Tweakables" button. Then, as Wobbly Av8r said, use the Interstage Nodes button on the fairing.