bewing

No, that's a bug. The "landed on kerbin" penalty isn't being applied to the scientist for some reason. In any other location, the two values will be the same for you.
 

There are two varieties of fairings. There are "regular" fairings with pointy tops. And there are "interstage" fairings that are cylindrical at the top where they connect to the next stage. Interstage fairings are hollow inside. Regular fairings are solid inside. So what happens if you spawn a Kerbal inside an interstage fairing is that it works fine. OTOH, If you spawn a Kerbal inside a pointy fairing they get shot out the top or bottom or they die. So I'm going to take a wild guess that you are using a pointy fairing.
To fix it, all you need to do is put a nosecone above the fairing (on an interstage node). And then build the fairing to attach to the nosecone as an interstage fairing.
 

Below 45 degrees, it doesn't help. Say you are in a low circular orbit, at speed X. A 45 degree plane change will cost you an additional X. But an X/2 burn will get you to the SOI boundary, where your plane change cost is zero. But then you need to come back down again, for an additional cost of X/2. So there's your cost of X again.
For a plane change of more than 45 degrees, it starts to be energetically beneficial.

Clipping problems are something to consider for some parts -- but as Foxster says, not for wings or any aerodynamic control surfaces.
In 1.2, the places you have to worry most are around fairings. I understand you are running ver 1.1 currently, and IIRC, clipping wheels is also something to worry about in ver 1.1.
 

Usually this is an aerodynamics problem. Typically what this means is that your ship is coming in nose-first.
Sometimes the aerodynamics on a particular ship simply does not work, and you have to fix the aerodynamics in the VAB and redo the mission.
Depending on how much fuel you have left, and whether you have solar power and batteries, it may be possible to aerobrake your orbit. The more aerobraking you do, the more likely you will be to survive.
When you burn the fuel, you want to do it as late as possible -- when you are as far down in the atmosphere as you can be and still maintain control.
Sometimes, tumbling the rocket as it reenters can reduce your speed just enough to help you survive.
And it's very important to know for these kinds of problems: do you have any drogue parachutes on this ship?

Generally, this happens when you have engines that are gimballed or thrust vectored, and the core you choose to work from is on the wrong side of the CoM. Because the engine is on the other side of the CoM, the SAS system tries to turn it in the opposite direction of the reaction wheels and aerodynamic surfaces. Often this is not what you want, and all 3 of these inputs fight each other. The first easy trial solution being to disable the thrust vectoring/gimballing.
If you want to see this work in a simpler environment, try putting a ship in space. Put some reverse-facing gimballed engines at one end. Activate the engines, and then start switching between various SAS targeting modes, and watch which direction the engines swivel. They will probably always swivel the wrong way.
 

Alt F12 to go to the Debug Menu/Physics Tab/Visualize Autostruts.
Parts that are right next to the Root part may not display an autostrut if they are autostrutted to the root part, I think -- and the autostruts overlap, too. So you can't be absolutely certain that you're seeing all of them.

I tested out your launcher (after tweaking it a bit) -- and all you need to do to make it work the way you want is to turn off the truss structure. You don't need the truss for what you have built. The truss structure is for hanging complex stuff off the inside of the fairing (an advanced technique) -- and your tug is built very simply and properly right on top of your stack the way it should be.
In the VAB, if you look at your fairing's context menu, the button that says "Truss Structure" should say Off.
(This doesn't affect the bug report though -- but I'm still trying to figure out what the heck your truss is connecting to ...)

Did you get your copy of the game from Steam? If so, have you verified your download? Perhaps you are doing something wrong, but what you are describing should be impossible -- which also implies a possible corrupted game download.

No, that's not it. When you grab anything with your klaw, your "control from here" point gets reset -- often to that thing you just grabbed. Which is always pointing in some strange direction. If you look really closely, you will realize that your navball is pointed all wrong.
All you have to do to fix it is right-click on the klaw, or a probe core, or any other control point (that's pointing in the correct direction), and say "control from here". Sadly, sometimes when you flip into map mode or switch focus away from this ship and back again, it will reset your control point all wrong again. So you have to be careful of that, and keep making sure to reset it properly.
If you reset your control point, suddenly everything will work easy again.
 

Because slowing down takes time, and cooling off takes time, and heating can happen very fast. If your ship takes on heat slowly, and has time to cool itself, then it will slow down. If your ship takes on heat faster than it can cool itself, kaboom.
No. Your incoming path defines a plane. Your desired orbit defines another plane. You can minimize the difference between these two planes by making that difference perpendicular to your direction of travel, but you can't make it go away (unless you got lucky and the perpendicular difference was zero to begin with). So the best you can do is to minimize that difference at your midpoint correction -- and when you do your capture burn, leave your Ap really really high and do your plane adjustment at whichever node is at the higher altitude.

The entire problem is summed up in the antenna range equation, for connecting between two antennas:
Connection Range = sqrt ( AntennaRange1 * AntennaRange2)
Your HG5 has a range of 5000km. Your RA15 has a range of 15000000km. So connection range = sqrt (5 x 10^3 x 15 x 10^6) km = sqrt (7.5 x 10^10) km = 274000 km.
That is, about a quarter of a Gm. So your fuel depot needs  a much bigger antenna, or you have to have a relay ship traveling with it, or you need to use "limited control mode" on your fuel depot.
 

Is this happening in a new career game? You don't get "t minus" until you've upgraded your Tracking Station to tier 2.

It's a lot like doing a polar one. You wait unti KSC is below the orbital line you want, and you launch with a heading of 45 degrees or 135 degrees -- instead of 0 or 180.

He's talking about one step further than you are already -- after you have burned some to get out of orbit: when you are already suborbital, with your impact point at your selected landing site.
Then when you are creating the maneuver node, you have two Aps. One is on your blue line, and one is on the orange "post maneuver" line. The Ap he means is the orange one -- the "node" Ap.
 

OK, I tried out my suggestion. And ...
Woohoo! 400 m/s in bote mode (at 415 m/s it started to break apart). Heh! This is fun! It takes off from the water at 150 m/s if you tell it to. Flies really nice.  Lands really nice at 55 m/s with the front elevons deployed and full of fuel! Takes off at 100 m/s from land.
OK, ok, you have to try this. Sorry for modding your craft so heavily, but you just have to try this.
Craft file:
http://pastebin.com/raw/88PnLrte
(actually, I probably should have taken that extra oxidizer out of the two bicouplers -- forgot to do that)

1. It is KerbNet that scans for anomalies, and KerbNet can only be active on one core at a time. It's not even per vessel.
2. Not exactly. They do not add/stack. Higher tech probe cores have better odds of detecting an anomaly -- but they will detect all the anomalies that a low-tech core would detect. So there would be no benefit to having the low-tech core along with the high tech one.
3. All probe cores of the same type will detect the same anomaly on the same day. So there's no benefit to stacking them, except ...
4. The RoveMate core has special detection capabilities, and that is the only one which would carry a benefit for adding as a second core.

OK, several little things wrong with your plane -- but your basic design is OK. I understand that this is your first one, so you are throwing the kitchen sink at it -- and then I assume that you intend to have the fun of doing engineering refinements on it once it flies a little.
So, first -- your front engines appear to be directly in front of your rear engines. KSP does model this problem in most cases, and cancels the thrust of any engine that has something directly behind it. So your front engines are probably doing nothing at all except using fuel.
Second, the jet engines are really very efficient. You won't want to fly more than maybe 1000 km roundtrips with your first plane, so you've got waaaaay too much fuel. And the fuel is heavy, and probably makes your plane hard to fly. So yeah, you are going to want to remove almost all the fuel in your center fuselage.
So my basic suggestion is: dump the front engines. Take the rear pair of engines and move them backwards to where your rear stabilizers are now. Attach the rear stabilizers to the outside of your engine nacelles. As said above, you want the CoM a lot closer to your CoL, and doing what I'm suggesting will probably accomplish that. After that, I bet your plane flies.
 
 

Heh. Well phrased question. But I think the answer is messy. It takes a constant time -- very near 18 seconds (I think) to fill one tank of any size from any number of tanks of any number of other sizes. It takes N times that long to fill N tanks. So, if it can fill the other tanks, it will take 18*n, no matter how you try to arrange things.
If V0 < Vi * n, then the answer is 18 * n * (V0 / Vi * n) = 18 * V0 / Vi -- which may be longer or shorter than 18 seconds, depending on the ratio.
 
 

If you look at the converters in the VAB, and click to open their extended information -- there is a confusing set of numbers: "Cooling required" and "Max Cooling".
Cooling required is the amount of cooling you need if you have one "channel" of the converter running at 100% load. 200kW on the Convert-o-tron 250.
The next number is even more confusing. Max Cooling is the total maximum amount of cooling that can be applied to the converter. 500kW on the Convert-o-tron 250.
So, you have 3 channels running at 123% load. Now, a 5 star engineer can reduce the heating by 25%. So, effectively, you have 3 channels at 98% thermal load * 200kW = 588kW of heating.
You have lots and lots of potential cooling, but what's that Max again? 500kW.
So you are running 88kW higher than the Max. So yes, you're going to get a little bit of overheating.
 

Yes, the engine thrust curves are scaled by Mach number, and Mach number is scaled by atmospheric density and temp -- all that is indeed modeled.

The phrase "messing around with a calculator" sounds to me like "doing things by hand" -- so you may not know about the public spreadsheet:
 

They are identical. Just pop out of Kerbin's SOI to complete both.

Nope. Sorry.
The best I've ever been able to do is to point the nose of my ship directly at the waypoint, and then look along the line of the ship to try to guess exactly the point on the ground where it's aiming.
 

Reputation is asymptotic. It maxes out at +1000 and -1000, and it gets there gradually -- you can never actually reach either of those numbers. As you approach those two limits, it takes more and more earned reputation to move the meter 1 click forward.
Moving it in the other direction gains a multiplier.