I had the same problem as you actually, and ended up getting a bunch of mods. I deleted most of them, but the ones I kept were
Kerbal Engineer: I know that everyone thinks this mod is for superadvanced players, but it also tells you things like your eccentricity and your hottest part on your spacecraft, TWR ratio, etc.
Station Science: Basically makes orbital stations actually do stuff. You can bring up pods to do experiments, and other stuff. It's kinda complicated tho.
Module Manager: Helps makes some mods work.
IFI life support and Planetshine are cool mods also.
There's a lot of mods out there though, just keep looking.