How can I get this heavy rocket into Kerbin orbit?

[Commissioner Tadpole]

Ah, the demo...I cut my teeth on the demo.

Your final design is what I rather crudely call a "Phallus 7", a tall, narrow lander that does the job but has a tendency to tip over if you land on a grade. Bingo fuel level on a Phallus 7 is 80 liquid fuel units. Once you get down that far, either get back into orbit or plan on not coming back. Start thinking about an abort when you get to 90.

Now, I know that the smallest tank in the demo is the FL-T400, so I'll forgo my usual advice of "use four tanks to shorten and widen the stack", because I know you're already doing the best you can with what you got. That said, three FL-T400s set radially outboard, with fuel lines going from the outboard tanks to the center and your lander legs attached to those outboard tanks will improve the lander's stability. Just saying. Do not switch to an FL-T800 just for the sake of having more fuel. Trust me on this one...I didn't name that ship the "Flying Death Trap 7" for no reason...

You need to use your radar altimeter when you're landing; it's a gauge that looks like this:

You can get to it via IVA ("C" key, "C" key to get back) and it is present in the Mk1 Command Pod in the demo. Use it to gauge the altitude of the surface.

Starting from a 14k orbit, give yourself a quick puff on the thrusters to bring your periapsis to about 5,000 over your target zone. When you almost get to periapsis, do a hard burn retrograde (make sure your speed gauge is set to "Surface" first) to bring that retrograde marker to vertically up (i.e. you want to kill your horizontal velocity as much as possible). Then kill your burn and go IVA, and watch the radar altimeter. When it starts to twitch downward and gets to an easy mark (say 2,000 or so), switch back to staging view and compare it to the altimeter; you know the surface is 2,000 meters below (so if the altimeter says 4800 when you switch back, you know the surface is at 2800). The rule for the Phallus 7 is that you don't want to be going much faster than 1 m/s per 10 m above the surface if you want to avoid lithobraking. Wait until you're about to that point of no return, then burn; don't burn the whole time, or you'll waste fuel. Watch your fuel level as you descend; I've already told you what to do if it gets to bingo fuel.

If you do happen to add those extra tanks like I mentioned, start burning sooner. Your lander should have enough fuel to get you back to Kerbin without problems but your craft will also decelerate slower.

Good luck.

That's a lot of info, but I'm going to try that.

Oops.

So, what rocket design did you end up using?

How much fuel do you have left?

How far back is your latest save?

And most importantly, how many tries did it take to land that thing?

The one Specialist gave to me.

The fuel is so few that it looks like an one pixel-wide vertical line.

My latest save was around when I was orbiting the Mün, I believe.

Just one try, surprisingly.

[Sirine]

It is recommended that you design your own rocket. Thats the 'satisfaction' come from.

Nowadays, Mun is like my backyard.

But, I'm still having "my-pride" of sending 10 Kerbals to Mun via Demo game. I hope that you will have yours.

[Commissioner Tadpole]

It is recommended that you design your own rocket. Thats the 'satisfaction' come from.

Nowadays, Mun is like my backyard.

But, I'm still having "my-pride" of sending 10 Kerbals to Mun via Demo game. I hope that you will have yours.

I was doing that, but I failed so much that I gave up.

Besides, this is only the demo, it's bound to lose it's fun quickly, anyway. (I REALLY WANT THE FULL VERSION!)

[Specialist290]

I was doing that, but I failed so much that I gave up.

A few general tips that might help you out a little:

Building an effective rocket is all about managing your mass. Ideally, the best rocket for a given mission is the one that's just small enough to get the job done without having any more mass for fuel, structure, or instruments than is absolutely necessary. (In practical terms, of course, the best rocket for the job is always going to be better than the one you actually built, so I wouldn't worry overmuch about trying to make things perfect or optimizing them past a certain point. "'Perfect' is often the enemy of 'good'", as they say.)

Because of the way rockets work, you need to have fuel to be able to lift the rocket itself, but to lift that fuel, you need to have even more fuel, and so on. A long time ago, a smart man by the name of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky came up with a way to quantify exactly how much fuel it would take to accomplish a given mission with a given rocket. I'll link to a few resources that go into a bit more depth about the specifics, but the long and short of it is: A rocket's total potential to change its own velocity from a standing start can be calculated precisely if you know the total mass of the full rocket before launch, the final mass of the rocket when empty, and the efficiency of its engines. For most missions, however, the required "mass ratio" (full mass compared to dry mass) is excessive for a single rocket to push itself into space, so rocket scientists developed the idea of "staging" rockets to shed unneeded dead weight so that the fuel remaining in stages further along the staging progression can have more of an effect than it would if it had to haul all that unnecessary structure along for the ride.

Essentially, what you want to do is this: Build the smallest payload that you know can accomplish the final task (or that you think you'll need for the job). Then build a stage under it that's a little bit larger to get that payload where it needs to be. Then build another, larger stage under that to get it where it needs to be, and so on. It takes time and patience to get it balanced right, but once you've got that down, you can accomplish any mission you set your mind to simply by applying the same general principles to different situations and adjusting your designs to suit your needs.

If you want to really dig into the nuts and bolts to learn how you can try to calculate your rocket's performance in a measurable way without relying entirely on trial and error (though at least a little bit of that is going to be unavoidable no matter what you do), then I'd highly advise taking a look at MyKSPCareer.com, which goes over the basics of Tsiolkovsky's rocket equation, thrust-to-weight ratios (another important factor, especially for takeoffs and landings), and how these concepts can be applied to your rockets in Kerbal Space Program in layman's terms. You may also want to read these three pages over at Atomic Rockets, which try to do the same thing from a real-world (non-KSP-specifc) perspective; that site was very useful to me when I was first learning how to play the game myself. And, of course, there's a whole slew of tutorials that I have listed in the Drawing Board, including a number that are directed specifically at people who are still trying to find their legs in the game.

Hope all this helps!

[Sirine]

Agree with above.^

Everybody has their "tale to tell".

When they been ask, "How is your 1st Mun Landing experience?"

Create your own legends, which you will feel proud of.

[neutron95]

At least it is better than my first Mün landing in the demo. I ended up landing with a much too big lander (2x long tanks tall), falling over, destroying the rocket while attempting to right it, and then I discovered that Jeb was locked in the capsule by a ladder .