A civilian

I've just completed my first ever base on Minmus, and here's how i did it. Since it was a Career save, money was on my mind. So I sought to design a reusable shuttle/lander that i can just keep on refueling. That lander looks like a spaceplane. At the back is a Construction Port Sr. , which allows me to dock my modules to it and land them horizontally. I land the modules, and use the lander's wheels to move and dock the base parts. Once building with just the lander proved difficult, I sent a construction rover. Although setting up the lander and the initial base parts would be costly, if the base has ISRU and mining drills then it would be a vital asset. With the lander, laboratory, command hubs, mining necessities, power generation, everything cost me about 1.5 million credits, which is surprisingly lower than I expected.

I was farming Funds through Mun and Minmus orbit and flyby space tourism contracts. Eventually i decided to try and make a slightly bigger ship. I strapped stuff that made sense and hit the Launch button. Horrible ship design, carelessness, and a rough launch left me with 750 units of LF and its equivalent OX with a 20 ton spacecraft in LKO. I thought, "eh, screw it" and went ahead on my mission. First part was the Minmus orbit insertion. Nothing wrong there. After exiting Minmus orbit, I plot a flyby to the Mun. Only when I got close did I realize that my stupid self just set a collision course for the Mun. I had to do a course correction burn and entered an orbit that is milliseconds of prograde burn away from exiting Mun SOI. After doing the prograde burn, I see that I was at 100 units of LF left, not enough to deorbit back home. As i messed around with the maneuver nodes, I realized I can flyby the Mun again to decelerate. I tried one flyby and it wasn't enough. I tried it again, making two full flybys to decelerate to 2,500km apoapsis. As i ran out of fuel in deorbiting, the periapsis was at 46km, so i decided to decouple the service module early, giving me a 1km kick. As I reentered, I realize that there weren't enough parachutes, and I was coming in to land at 13 m/s. Fortunately, the heat shield took the impact, and all seven passengers made it home alive. I earned about 700 000 Funds after the sweet, sweet recovery button. By the way, I didn't opt for a rescue mission because I am still puzzled by this fascinating subject called Orbital Rendezvous.