stenole

Regardless of engine choice(s), I favour splitting the lander into two stages. There is always lots of equipment that you brought down that you don't really need to bring back up. It also makes it less of a crisis if something is damaged during landing because the damage usually does not affect the ascent stage. If I need to land several places, I just bring several landers. I usually only use nervas for transfers. The size of the terrier makes it more convenient as a lander engine because of how well it works together with lander legs.

It's hard to judge how steepthe learning curve is for another person. The game itself is very simple. Put a pod, some fuel and an engine on the launch pad and you are ready to go. Trial and error gets you pretty far. If you ever get stuck in the game and you can't figure it out yourself, you will end up looking it up and learning just enough to defeat the problem at hand.

When the engines' Isp noticably increases when placing them at the top instead of the bottom.

In career mode, I've noticed that when you bring tourists back to Kerbin, they gain some experience. But once they have seen everything they want to see they disappear along with all the experience. My suggestion is to remember the tourists after completing the missions and that the same tourists will spawn new missions. If you accept the mission, you will get the tourist back at the experience level he was at before. That would give you a reason to keep picking tourist missions. You could progressively "train" your tourists by picking their missions. To make this feature not completely pointless, it would be cool if they received abilities and bonuses like the other kerbonaut classes. An example would be getting additional reputation when visiting new sites, also those that are originally not part of the mission. Higher level tourists receive higher rewards. Higher level tourists will also demand more difficult destinations. This adds to the stakes of tourist missions. Not only are you risking failing the mission, you might also lose Tourfred Kerman, the level 4 tourist.

In the editor, with CoM and CoL visible, rotate the entire craft in the roll plane 90 degrees. If the CoL is in front of the CoM, the craft is unstable in the yaw plane. Another way to check it is to rotate the ship a few degrees in the yaw plane and look at which way the lift arrow is rotating the ship. If it is pulling the ship away from where you want it to point, it means it is unstable. You can also use this method for ships with wings at odd angles to determine not only if it is stable near prograde, but also if it has angles where it is naturally unstable. Since body lift and warping of the wings during flight is not taken into account in the editor, it is not 100% reliable. It gives you a ballpark estimate of what is wrong though, and it saves you the trouble of needing to test everything incrementally in flight.

When I'm switching to my planned Laythe glider craft in orbit from the tracking station and a couple parts of the wings go poof. F3 reveals that they impacted the launchpad while in orbit. It is one of the few mission breaking bugs that has made me crack a smile.

pilots don't magically make reaction wheels work without electricity. But in the case of an antenna using up more power than the solar panels produce, because the antenna uses electricity in bursts, the power will recharge a little between the bursts so that reaction wheels will work a little bit. But in complete absence of electricity, reaction wheels shut down as well. That doesn't mean that SAS is completely useless. Engine gimbals need to be controlled too.

With the avionics hub and probe cores, SAS gets turned off everytime the battery level hits 0, for example the bursting elelctricity use of antennas. It can be an issue when doing lots of transmitting on the shadow side of a celestial body.