bewing

Are you using any mods, such as KJR?

Try increasing the spring strength to max. And this has nothing to do with the autostrut. It only has to do with the suspension settings. Different wheel sizes also have different behaviors.

It flips and it doesn't slow down as fast -- because aerodynamics depends on shape. Pointy things have lower drag than blunt things. And flipping and slowing down depends on drag.

I believe there is such an equation -- but there are some problems. The first problem is that simply hitting a particular inclination is often not useful, unless you also hit some particular LAN -- which is basically impossible with just an equation. The second problem is that it is mathematically impossible to hit an inclination which is less than your starting latitude. You can guess at a heading (as a deviation from east = 90), I suppose, by just subtracting your starting latitude from your desired inclination.

As FleshJeb said, you can start some nacelles by radially attaching some nosecones. Or you can start with fuel tanks -- almost all fuel tanks are radially attachable. Or Structural Fuselages. Then attach the Crew Cabins either ahead or behind any of those radially attached thingies. To get the nacelles into the proper locations, you will likely have to use the Move gizmo in the editor.

Well, not necessarily. I would do it as an MK1 capsule, on top of a MK1 crew cabin, with two more MK1 crew cabins as nacelles. That gives you a short little squatty (and very lightweight) non-awkward craft for landing and kerbin reentry. You just have to be very careful about reentry heating, because the crew cabins are delicate.

I prefer something more like this: Cheaper than the plane above. Easier to fly. Easier to land. Probably faster, too.

Those contracts are supposed to complete when you are closer than something like 5Km, and your relative speed drops below .5 m/s for more than 1 second -- or something like that.

The difference is that you don't need a Kerbal, and you don't have to go out on EVA -- which is useful if you are flying along in the atmosphere at 500 m/s.

Double click the name of the craft in the information window, as Zhetaan said.

I tend to wait to do robotic landings until I have the HECS probe core, because it gives you the "retrograde hold" SAS mode. It is certainly possible to do landings with just "Stability hold", but I think anyone other than an expert would also need RCS on their lander to keep the lander from falling over after it touches down.

You seem to have missed the "Collect All" button in the context menu of the container. It actively gathers one copy of each science experiment on the entire craft.

But you can suck the crew report out via a science container if you include one in your craft -- or you can do the EVA trick. Then that leaves the slot open again in the pod to take another crew report.

You can certainly build stations out of pieces, however, there is one trick that you have to be very careful of. Of course, every part that you dock to your station has to have been built after the contract was accepted. However, please note very carefully that statement also applies to spacetugs, and refueling depots. The "age" of a combined docked craft is the older of the two docked craft. So if you refuel a spacetug from an old tanker, and then use the spacetug to grab some station part, and then dock that part to the station -- you're in trouble. However, if you do all the work to complete a contract, but then the contract refuses to complete from some little quirk of the game, nobody will ever blame you for using the Alt-F12 menu to force the contract to completion.

As cavscout74 said, the contracts you get are somewhat random. There are something like 14 different types. But I'm a little surprised you haven't seen a satellite one yet. I suspect you will see one quite soon. The "full" version of your reputation is shown on the "Crew" tab of your Mission Completion window when you recover a vessel. However, the "percentage" version of it is just the full version divided by 10. So your full rep is in the 610 range.

You need to have reached kerbin orbit. You need a Level 2 tracking station. You need to have unlocked the OKTO probe core, and the "Electrics" tech node (for solar panels), and there is a minimum Reputation requirement of about 300.

All engines have an "Activate/Deactivate" button in their context menus. So you get to orbit, right click on each engine, and click the "Deactivate" button. You can also do this with an action group, to turn off all the Mammoths at the same time. If monoprop and RCS thrusters are not providing sufficient oomph, then you might want to consider using Vernors instead. They eliminate the need for monoprop, which simplifies your craft design -- and they have quite a lot of thrust.

KSP is based on the Unity game engine. Unity is closed source. Damping is an "exposed variable" in an otherwise hidden suspension calculation. What is does is black magic. It should have something to do with the "damping factor" in the classic spring equation. That is, the coefficient on the x-dot term. And then calibrated so that "critical damping" occurs at a Damping setting of 1. However, that's not really what happens, exactly. All you can do in reality is tweak the value until it basically does what you want.

Yes, using an engineer with some stars to place the experiments does make a difference, but I'm not sure if not doing it can cause these issues.

For the initial airplane node, the main point is weight/mass. Because of the limitations on the wheels. So the first basic point is: don't get fancy! You're limited to (at most) 7 tonnes mass for your first plane. It will fly slowly -- 200 m/s max. So don't expect to fly very far until you've unlocked the next tech node. If you want to make an easy to fly plane, make it a canard-wing design. Main wings in the back, canard wings (I prefer to use tailfins) on the nose. If you use the MK1 LF tank, take half the fuel out. You won't need 400 units -- you probably won't even need 100 units. I find it works well to put an MK1 command pod on the nose, and put the small air intake on the front of that. Don't expect to land in the wilderness until you have upgraded the wheels, and the engine. A juno is a weak engine, and the cessna stick wheels are fragile. Once you've slapped it all together, turn on the CoM and CoL indicator, and make sure the CoL ball is just behind the CoM (touching is OK). And I think there are some writeups in the Tutorials section of this forum about building basic planes.

Just use W -- F is mostly just a shortcut.

Are you always testing this with action groups? How about individual button clicks? Action groups got modified a lot in this recent update -- I can imagine they might not be working right. And this being a career game you are playing -- do you have the gravioli detector yet? And yeah, I guess I was wrong about crew reports working in low orbit. It's just graviolis and EVA reports. But it's been that way a long time. I was more concerned about what you said about about "in flight" in atmosphere.

Something, somehow is messed up in your game, though. You may want to delete some folders -- maybe the entire gamedata folder -- and revalidate.

When I tested it, the tylo "visit" award worked wrong. I don't know if it's been fixed since then. But there's no special award for landing there.

Validate your download, because your game files are corrupt.