If you are coming in fast from interplanetary space, you'll either need to aerobrake or burn a good deal of fuel to get yourself into LKO. While aerobraking from interplanetary space to put yourself into a nice orbit is easy enough in KSP, in real life things are much more difficult (just for starters, in KSP your station is probably at 0 degrees inclination unless you went out of your way to put it somewhere else...).
Get FAR, RSS, Deadly Rentry, put your space station somewhere around 50 degrees inclination, then try it with suitably small probe. The Stardust spacecraft was 300kg; the sample return capsule was 46kg and reentered at nearly 13km/s.
Just one full small kerbal RCS tank puts you at 250kg, so you'll need to nearly empty that just for starters...
Get FAR, RSS, Deadly Rentry, put your space station somewhere around 50 degrees inclination, then try it with suitably small probe. The Stardust spacecraft was 300kg; the sample return capsule was 46kg and reentered at nearly 13km/s.
Just one full small kerbal RCS tank puts you at 250kg, so you'll need to nearly empty that just for starters...