SDEngineer

rcp27 - yes, the aerocapture to lithocapture window is very small these days, and varies a lot based on each individual craft. My first simple Duna satellite probe that I sent in aerocaptured anywhere between 19 and 21.5km - any higher and it failed to capture, any lower and it wound up suborbital. My second Duna satellite, larger, less aerodynamic, and carrying a lander (bound for Ike) aerocaptured between 20.5 and 23km. Clearly with the new aero, it is much more individual, and seems that it will be unlikely that there will be a single "good" trajectory to take inbound, likely to any atmospheric body.

It's faster to get a match (and you can usually start much earlier) by burning target retrograde at the closest intercept node to null your relative velocity, then burning direct at the target (not target prograde) until the intercept node hits minimum and starts increasing again, and then repeat when you again get close to the intercept node until you get an intercept of <100m. Even in Kerbin orbit, I can start washing the orbits this way at 15km+ separation and have a 100m intercept within 3-4 burns.

MechJeb is in fact quite awesome for nearly completely automating these types of routine missions. However, since you haven't unlocked the rendezvous module yet, you may want to watch a tutorial on rendezvous procedures. Your docking time doesn't seem too out of line for a completely manual procedure, but your rendezvous time is really really high, suggesting that you may be missing a few key points on how to do an efficient rendezvous. From orbit, it should probably take no more than 4-5 min for a rendezvous to <100m, particularly around Minmus, where your orbits are so low that a fast Hohmann transfer orbit is cheap from a dV perspective. Scott Manley as I recall has an excellent rendezvous tutorial, I watched it and pretty much instantly halved my rendezvous time, and have been refining those techniques ever since. MechJeb can probably cut the entire ascent->docking procedure down to about 4-5 min total with time acceleration. I think also, as someone else above pointed out, your mining ship may be a bit on the small side. It's Minmus after all - get a honking monster of a mining ship out there so that you can fill the ore tanks and take a huge load of ore up to the processing facility. Your efficiency will skyrocket if instead of spending 80% of your mission profiling travelling, you are only spending 25% of it travelling, and the rest of the time filling your gargantuan ore hold with rocks.

Nifty idea. Hold your fuel in a common pool and only refine what you need into small holding tanks just big enough for the maximum you'd use at any time. Particularly a good idea for a mothership, since mine are always powered by LV-Ns, but carry landers with LF+O rockets, so with the 1.0 changes, this would keep me from needing to estimate the amount of oxidizer I the missions will require (and likely over-estimating wasting dV and tank space or under-estimating and not being able to complete a landing I would have otherwise been able to).

Minmus, of course, because it's made of mint ice cream, or at least so Jeb swears.

<ALT>+L is your friend - always lock your staging when you don't expect to be doing any soon. Fun story though. And yes, you should always send another ship. Just because it's Kerbal.

I'm at work, so can't look at the craft files right now, but there are a few pointers that you might want to check. Your mention of "crossfeeding" and the tanks draining "oddly" suggests that you may have some fuel lines pointed the wrong way. Orientation of the fuel line matters - the side you connect first when placing a fuel line is the "fuel donor", and the side connected last is the "fuel receiver". Making a mistake when doing this will lead to all sorts of problems, particularly if other lines are actually placed correctly. You can see the fuel line orientation if you zoom in close (there are little arrows pointing the direction of the receiver). Also, generally, you want to keep the fuel line situation simple. KSP is known to do odd things if you try to connect multiple donors directly to multiple receivers. One donor to multiple receivers is usually fine (i.e. a central fuel tank feeding multiple radially attached engines works fine), as well as multiple donors feeding a single receiver (typical asparagus staging for example, where the central tank is typically going to be fed by the two final radially attached engines, or onion staging where the radial tanks all feed the central tank), but if you try something like having each of the asparagus radial stages feed the central tank, and each radial stage ALSO feed the next radial stage in the asparagus sequence, the fuel behavior will likely not behave as expected. One final caveat - never connect two tanks directly together in both directions (even through a chain). For example, Tank A feeds Tank B, and Tank B feeds Tank A, or A feeds B which feeds C which feeds A. If you wind up with a circular connection the behavior gets very unpredictable.

In the early game, when I'm just within the Kerbin SOI, just one at a time. Once I go interplanetary though, I definitely do other things as well, but I do tend to just accomplish a few things then go back and time warp whatever interplanetary mission is closest to it's next "checkpoint". For example, current game I have a lander halfway to Eve (just finished fine tuning the intercept). I have a reasonable dV launch window to Duna coming up in about 2 Kerbal weeks, so I've launched that mission into orbit awaiting the transfer burn, and am meanwhile running a few incidental contracts (rescuing a few Kerbals, launching a throwaway solar station, etc) to pay for a new Minmus fuel mining station I want to launch to Minmus. I should have those done by the time the Duna launch window comes up, then I can start the Duna burn, and swap back to the Eve mission to time warp to an Eve rendevous - land the Eve lander and do some SCIENCE!, then swap back to the Duna probe which should be ready for it's fine tuning burn by about that point. Then head back to Kerbin and do a few more local contracts/infrastructure building, and look for another good launch window for another interplanetary mission, and repeat the cycle.

Was the entire station brand new? If you attached missing parts to fulfill the contract requirements to an existing station it won't fire (as the "root" of the final station will be the original "old" station not fulfilling that particular contract parameter). Other than that, I can't see anything wrong with the station.

Generally with MechJeb, you've already done what it can do well enough to become proficient at it before it unlocks the ability in the tech tree. Besides, at a certain point in your KSP career, it becomes more about building your space program, and less about actually piloting all the missions yourself. I generally personally fly all my "historically significant" missions (all my first landings, major launch of a new interplanetary explorer class ship, etc). But do you really want to do something like personally dock every single fuel tanker transport coming from Minmus to your LKO refuelling station? I don't. Those are what I fly with MechJeb fully automating, since it will go far faster. I'm good at flying and docking, but MechJeb, since it uses time acceleration so well, can fly a Minmus fuel mission to my LKO station and have it docked there in a tenth the time I can do it myself - for a mission profile I've done a half dozen times personally and need to do at least a dozen times every Kerbal year.

Check your staging. Sometimes KSP, particularly if you're adding and removing engines, makes mistakes in how it sets up staging. My Duna probe wound up with the parachutes on the same stage as my rendevous (final) engine, so when I fired that engine to fine tune my Duna approach, it also deployed my parachutes (fortunately, my Duna entry was cool enough and slow enough that it didn't actually destroy my chutes, but if the same mistake had been made on a Kerbin re-entry vehicle, it would have been bye-bye parachutes at about 15000 ft). Please note though, the parachute does not actually deploy until it goes below a certain atmospheric level, so it visually looks like the parachute is still packed, but by default it will deploy itself quite high up while you are still moving very fast, so it is instantly destroyed by the airspeed and heat if it has already been staged. You can fix this by adjusting the atmospheric pressure it will deploy at as another poster above noted (I think you may be able to do this on the fly, but not sure - if not, you will have to wait for a rescue mission to come up and get your Kerbals and science out). I try to remember to do a staging checklist before launching any vehicles (I simply had forgotten this time, and fortunately a cheap mistake that didn't wind up killing the mission) going over the major "oops" possibilities (like launch clamp releases before igniting the first stage - this is something that KSP usually does, and if not corrected, can easily destroy a mission on the pad).

Post 1.0, the most cost effective way to refuel anything is probably to build a fuel refinery on Minmus (or in Minmus orbit, with ore ferried by a mining ship from Minmus itself). Fairly cheap to set up the infrastructure, assuming you have the appropriate tech nodes unlocked (maybe a half million to set up a fuel depot in orbit, a miner/ore carrier for the ore, and a fuel tanker to move fuel wherever you need it). Drawback of course would be the time to set it up and the time it takes to mine and move the ore - but the dV savings over time is frankly enormous. You only spend a few hundred dV to get the ore (and therefore fuel) to the Minmus fuel depot, and then (assuming you aerobrake properly) another few hundred dV for the fuel transfer vehicle to get to LKO to actually do the refuel, and aside from the initial launches to put those craft in orbit, no further wastage as those craft will never need to return to Kerbin. Essentially at that point, it's free fuel forever for anything that has made it to LKO. Given that you're looking at 5 orange tanks, the savings will be huge, and it's likely cheaper to set up a Minmus fuelling operation than to find a way to launch 5 full orange tanks worth of fuel into orbit (my 40t launches to LKO, which is roughly equivalent to 1 orange tank, are typically well over 100K/launch). However, if you're dead set on lifting that much mass from Kerbin, you're right, it's not an easy answer. What you're looking for is the payload that you can lift to LKO expressed as tons, then divided by the cost of the total spacecraft to get a kerbal kredit/ton cost. While I haven't done any math on this, simply based on my own designs I think the "cheapest" way to do it is with a ton of relatively small launches - I can get 5t into orbit at well under 10% of the cost for a 40t launch, even though my payload fraction for a 40t launch to LKO is definitely higher.

No need to use different adaptors to change the angles. You can use SHIFT+(change orientation keys WASDQE) in the VAB and rather than changing the orientation by 90 degrees it will change it by 5 degress each time instead. Very handy for lights, landing gears, wings, etc.

Already always used them. True, bases/rovers/satellites didn't really have a lot of purpose in vanilla .23 and before (stations were quite useful as staging/refueling points), but I used them anyway for pure RP value. They were just fun to build and set up.

For 2, he means any off-centered mass. In the case of your aircraft, you have a number of engines (heavy mass parts) that are mostly distributed on one side (the bottom side) of your aircraft. In air, not a problem (or at least, not an insurmountable one), but once in space, it means that your craft will "push" towards the bottom side, since it is bottom-heavy - the mass isn't evenly distributed. For 4, you need to monitor the air intake of your engines (you can see it on the fuel status tab), once it drops to just above the point at which you will start having flameouts (which depends on the engine) you will need to shut off the jet engines simultaneously, and then switch on the rockets (generally use action group keys - one assigned to enable/disable the engines as a group, the other to enable/disable the rockets). Most of the time, if you're doing a SSTO (single stage to orbit) you will level off at below the altitude your engines will flame out on, and start building speed in a level trajectory - as you speed up, your air intakes get more air - then you can gradually start gaining altitude again. Still, at some point, you will have to switch over to rocket power.