Macro water drop photography?

First off, I have a Nikon D200, with a 3rd party external flash that I can use off-camera with a flash sync cord.

What lens should I use?
-50mm f/1.4
-18-55mm
-70-300mm
-(I can do the 'reverse lens' macro w/ the 50mm and 70-300, but I think it might be too close, even @70mm)

My main goal is to get stuff like this: or this: where it's all just very "clean" lighting.

My first question is, how should I set up the lighting?
-I have that external flash with a sync cord (10ft), with a mini-softbox. So where should I place that?
-I also have a reflective disk w/ silver, white, and gold sides. The 'body' of the reflector can also be used as a diffuser disk. When/where/how should I use this?

My next question is what should I use for water dropping?
-I've tried many things… Turkey baster, cups, etc. But I can't get a consistent drop flow.

Regarding getting water droplets, I have used a bowl of water with a wet rag in the bowl and an end of the rag hanging over the edge of the bowl. Drops of water will fall from the end of the rag at a periodic rate. You can time the plopping sounds of the drops by ear and trigger your flash manually (use a push button switch wire to the flash PC jack to set off flash).

When I did this some decades ago, I set my camera on bulb and triggered an industrial strobe at the right time. Of course, this was done in a darkened room since the shutter remained open for 5 to 10 seconds. This method is a lot easier to time than trying to push the shutter release at the right time. I also had fun popping water balloons using an xacto knife. When the blade pierced the balloon, it would complete a circuit (I had a wire set inside of the balloon as the other contact), set off a pulse generator to delay the flash by an adjustable amount of time, and get the balloon in various states of popping.

Someone else will need to answer your other questions.

I'm not a Nikon guy so I'm not sure about the exact lens to use but I know this about macro photography. Its usually best to get a macro lens, especially for a shot this close and precise. I would say buy yourself a nice decent macro lens which looking at the Nikon lenses looks like you can get a 85mm 3.5 for about $500.

Now about the lighting I would say the best thing to do is experiment. Use different lighting and mess around. Digital photography is brilliant because you don't have a limit of shots, and if you do run out of memory you can just wipe the card. So yeah experiment and have fun with it would be my answer to that. Hope this helped!