Reactordrone

Well, either the monoliths got bigger or the Kerbals got smaller

Also make sure SAS is turned off and reaction wheels are disabled. Oscillations are frequently made worse by active SAS on a flexible structure.

With aircraft you can set maximum brakes and wind up the engines before take off, with rockets you can use launch clamps (I suppose you can also use launch clamps for aircraft as well).

As an example, I just circumnavigated Kerbin in this aircraft in about an hour. Had 800 fuel left in the tanks on landing. Top speed was over 1200m/s but I had to drop to about 1000m/s sometimes to cool down the cockpit.

You should probably switch to Whiplash engines, they excel at high speed flight. The Mk 1 cockpit is also going to get pretty toasty flying for extended periods at Mach 3.

Make sure you're coming in over water since you're going to need all the altitude you can get. Drop your periapsis down to about 40-45km and keep your engine and fuel tank on. When the ship starts to wobble away from retrograde burn off the remaining fuel and when you flip prograde decouple the engine and drop the heat shield. Wiggle the ship as much as possible to try to bleed off some more speed and pop the drogue chutes when safe to deploy. I've managed to get a lookalike ship landed a few times so it should be possible, if a little bit risky.

Orbit looks fine. Do you have enough power? Do you have an antenna for data transmission?

I'd say your stage balance is a little off. A small increase in the fuel on the upper stage would let you shrink that first stage down significantly. You usually want a lower stage to be about double the mass of the stages above it.

Since you're in a polar orbit you'll have to wait until you're at the right point in the Mun's orbit so that your Mun escape trajectory is tangential to the Mun's orbit (should be less than half a month). Raise your apoapsis to about the same as Minmus' orbit, adjust your plane to match Minmus when you're out there and then raise your periapsis to get an intercept with Minmus. it'll take a while but has fairly low delta-v (less than 250m/s).

Assuming the pages are laid out in a similar manner to the computer version you'll want to look in the "settings" on the main title page, "Input", move over to the "game" tab, look in "editor" for the scroll page up/scroll page down controls.

The lander has the highest delta-v requirement so I'd optimise for lander efficiency and rendezvous in low orbit. A high orbit will only save a few tens of m/s at most on the return to Kerbin.

Assuming you mean engines, you can go into settings on the main title page and set the default throttle setting to 100% (or wherever you want it to be). You'll still have to hit space to activate the engines through the staging sequence but that's normal and desirable.

Something like this should do it. Get up to about 5,000m at Mach 2, nose down, light the blue touch paper on the hammers and back home in time for tea and medals.

Command seats can certainly be grabbed. It might be very difficult to do on the surface though. If it proves too difficult you can always complete the contract from the debug menu.

Try maxing out the spring and damper values on the landing gear in the hangar. Stock settings can be a little bouncy. There's nothing worse than coming in nicely for a landing and having the aircraft nose bounce up into the air as soon as the wheel hits the ground.

The mk1 and 2 are both capable of landing on the Mun and returning (the Mk2 only just). I'd agree with ditching the ladders, they're not much use on the Mun and I'd also reduce the ablator on the heatshield by at least 50% and drain all of the monoprop to save weight. If you're flying it right that mk1's core booster should take you all the way from LV-T30 booster burnout to Mun suborbit. A full tank on the lander should give you way more delta-v than you need from that point.

You can wait until you're in Minmus' sphere of influence and do a correction burn or you can click on Minmus(or any body that you're approaching) at any point in your journey and select focus view and it will show you your projected path around that body and you can make your corrections before entering that body's sphere of influence. It tends to be cheaper to adjust from further away since any angular change gives a greater position change the further out you go. If you're unsure which way to burn to adjust your path once you're within a body's SOI you can picture a compass pointing at the planet or moon (North and south running through the planet's axis of rotation). The compass points correspond to the navball, north is 0°, east is 90°, south 180° and west is 270°. So if you need to move you orbital path from the left hand side of the planet as you look at it you'll burn east/90° in order to sweep your orbital path to the right.

You can transfer tourists through docking ports or the claw so a rescue mission should be possible as long as you have the advanced grabbing unit unlocked in the tech tree.

I don't think it could be landed even from a 70x70km orbit without some form of braking (airbrakes or engine) so unless he can preserve enough fuel for that by aerobraking his orbit down I don't think it'll matter.

I re-entered it from a 300-35km orbit with everything surviving while holding retrograde. The main problem comes lower down in the atmosphere where the ship just won't slow down enough so you could leave the airbrakes closed until you were below 30km

Even if you manage to avoid any heat related explosions on the way down that ship doesn't have enough drag to slow down to safe chute deployment speed and it'll just dive into the ground (forwards or backwards). You can add airbrakes near the command pod to get a usable craft but you'll have to claw on to that ship and transfer the crew to save the tourists from that ship.

Took the Kerbal X out for a spin and got an interesting multiple Mun encounter.

One of them. Delta-v to get into Earth orbit is much higher than Kerbin orbit. On the bright side a full sized Proton will get a lot of mass into Kerbin orbit.

If you're making a full sized Proton, the mainsail engine has basically the same specs as the RD-253 first stage engine. Second stage engines are more of a problem and the Vector is about as close as you'll get, you just have to knock their thrust down a little.

Think of it as if the Mun isn't there. If your ship was just orbiting where the Mun is and you wanted to drop your periapsis down to Kerbin you'd have to burn retrograde to do so. Making your ejection burn from the Mun give you that retrograde heading also takes advantage of the Oberth effect. Returning from low Mun orbit uses about 270m/s, if you were free flying at the same altitude as the Mun returning to Kerbin would use about 370m/s and if you burn to just barely escape from Mun orbit and then do a separate burn to get back to Kerbin you'd use over 500m/s.