Demo!

[Cenobite]

Hello all, I'm new to the kerbal scene. I really want to test the game out but it seems the demo portion of the website is always under maintenance. Is there an alternative route to getting the demo?

Edited August 30, 2017 by Cenobite

[Tex_NL]

You can try it here.

[severedsolo]

There was mention of this in another thread recently, but I don't seem to be able to find it now.

The demo has been taken down until 1.3.1 is released, as it was based on 1.0 and isn't really representative of the game as it was now. I believe a new demo will be uploaded then

Edited August 30, 2017 by severedsolo

[NorthernDevo]

...But if you CAN get it; regardless of version, the Demo is terribly fun. Speaking as a person who had serious financial issues a few years ago I couldn't afford the full game (or the Internet) for many years - but the demo was so fun and so much could be done with the basic parts it was enormously satisfying and entertaining. KSP's demo is easily as fun as the full version of many other games - so if you can find it, regardless of version, go ahead and have fun; you'll enjoy it a lot.

 

[wumpus]

I asked about it a month ago, and apparently the servers still work, they just aren't actively pointing to them.

This might be the "old" demo, the one on Steam (I think) was based on 1.0.0, and the one on Squad's site was based on 0.18 (the last they released for free).  I might have those backwards, but I suspect that they will only ship one demo based on 1.0.3 now.

Most of the information on this board should relate pretty close to the 1.0.0 demo.  The 0.18 demo is still quite good, but has some really strange effects:

There is a "souposphere": you want your rocket to go straight up for 10,000m, then make a hard right (45 degrees East) turn until apogee is >70,000m. 1.0.0 and later work better with a more realistic pitch progression.
There aerodynamic model is silly, parts have drag regardless of position.  Experienced rocket designers of this era designed rockets that looked more like pancakes than rockets.  1.0.0 fixes this, although horizontal staging may well be more stable (big rockets get unstable when noodly now).
TWR is optimal at 2.0 (throughout the souposphere).  This is hardly true on Earth or modern Kerbin (i.e. 1.0.0 and later).

There are probably other weird things to discover (and deal with while changing versions) but 0.18 pretty much captures the feel of launching little green men into space just as well as 1.0.0.  Have fun whichever version you get.

[Whirligig Girl]

The 1.0 demo is awful. The part selection is very limited and seemingly designed less to give you a good idea of what the game is like and more like a difficult version. Mun, Minmus, Sun, and Kerbin are the only celestial bodies (an improvement over previous version's Kerbin, Mun, and Sun), but getting to the Mun with the demo parts is not really possible in the 1.0 demo for someone new to the game. There's no steerable fin, no inline RCS tank (the radial sphere tank is what you get instead), the fuel tanks are all short (and wobbly), and you only get the LV-T30 engine (without thrust vectoring, too powerful for most upper stages). The atmosphere uses an in-development model that didn't even make it to 1.0, almost soupier than the souposphere of 0.90 and earlier, except this time aerodynamics matter (and given all of the radial parts and the limited 1.25m fairing, aerodynamics is not something you can really get)

I would actually recommend you try 0.13.3 (available on the forums for free) or 0.18.3 (free demo, no longer available from Squad) if you can find it. They're more fun, self-contained experiences than the 1.0-Demo. Even if they aren't updated for modern versions.