Reactordrone

It will depend a little on your thrust to weight ratio and flight profile but in general you want to launch before the station gets to your position, roughly when it reaches the western shore of the continent where the space centre is. If you launch a bit early you just increase your apoapsis to rendezvous. If you launch late keep your apoapsis low to catch up.

If your lander isn't returning to Kerbin you can ditch the parachute and heat shield.

I guess a simple way would be to have a target dV (4000m/s in vacuum for example) and add ore tanks in the VAB and fill them until the delta-v reaches that target. Check that your lift off TWR is reasonable and test fly to verify. Not sure why your upper stage fuel would need to be lowered for TWR since that's going to vary depending on payload and can be quite low with long burning first stages like the atlas has.

To do it in a single burn you basically want to keep raising your apoapsis so that it stays just in front of your current position. This will generally require very low thrust and you won't be able to time warp up to apoapse.

The clouds parted for about an hour around sunset so managed to get a shot of the conjunction, https://imgur.com/gallery/pcDp20S

If there's a red x next to the part requirement the game doesn't think you have that part. I'd check that first.

As I understand it you can't have loops in vehicle construction so only one set of docking ports can attach.

Just tested a ship with no other means of directional control and they seemed to work fine.

If you want ideas for small ships that can get to the Mun you might consider looking through the Kerbal caveman challenge thread.

Cursed launch week.

I built a version of the Minmus rocket. It's a little hard to fly deep in the atmosphere with fixed fins and engines but I managed to get it to Minmus and land on a few biomes so it's probably a piloting issue. Early on I had to make stupidly large rockets to land on the Mun and Minmus but practice makes perfect...or at least better.

In my experience the contracts for Duna and Eve come up as you are approaching the first transfer windows. If you've been playing around the Mun and Minmus for a long time you might have missed the Duna window so it brings up the Eve contract first.

For Mk3 planes there are a couple of fuel tanks you can use at the back, the Mk3 to Mk2 adapter and the Mk3 to 2.5m adapter.

You can effectively ignore the Mun to determine where you need to burn to reduce the altitude of the other side of your orbit. If the Mun wasn't there you would burn retrograde to lower the other side of your orbit so with the Mun in the picture you want the escape from the Mun to be tangential to the Mun's orbit and retrograde, i.e about 90° further around than you're doing it. https://imgur.com/W8XnKRb

You're burning on the wrong side of the Mun but the new orbit is the one in Kerbin's sphere of influence rather than the Mun and you do want to see where the orbit will be relative to Kerbin.

Get into the same orbital plane as the target spacecraft and have your orbit touch the target spacecraft's orbit at one point. If you're behind the other vehicle you want the rest of you orbit to be lower so that you orbit slightly faster and close the range with successive orbits. If you're ahead of the other vehicle you want your orbit to be higher so that you orbit slower than the other ship and they catch up a little bit with each orbit. If you have your tracking station and mission control upgraded you'll be able to select the other ship and see where the two ships will be in the next orbit. If you're not upgraded you can select a target by clicking on it when it gets within 100km. You can then switch the navball to target mode when you're getting close and try to line up your prograde marker to the target prograde marker (and retrograde to target retrograde).

If you have any other part right clicked you won't be able to transfer fuel so make sure you don't have any science instruments , engine or command pods open.

Minmus to Kerbin to Eve (165m/s to Kerbin + 110m/s boost close to Kerbin) can shave off a couple of hundred m/s compared to a Minmus to Eve transfer. It does make timing more difficult though.

You can also try going up hills in a zig zag. It reduces the effective incline by increasing the distance travelled for the altitude gain.

Going up it's flyable, you just have to be gentle with your initial turn since it has very little control authority. Coming down it will want to flip head first so you might want to put an extra decoupler on to get rid of that service bay.

Note that you can't send tourists outside your ship so if you need to transfer tourists and VIPs between ships(to a lander for example) they will need to be docked together to allow internal transfer.

On an external command seat I'm assuming.

At that point in the training you just need to execute the planned burn to bring up the next window. You may want to adjust your node a little to get the periapsis at the Mun above the surface.

First fifth landing successful. Finally saw the tension arms releasing during deployment.

It's very much going to depend on the mass of you vehicle. If you're making an 18t ship another 1.5t of engine is going to reduce the delta v. The first stage has to be designed to account for the second stage and third stage mass and you're going to end up with a larger vehicle to have the same delta v or more delta v.