Help a newbie get get to Minmus!

[DressedInRags]

Salutations, kerbalnauts. I'm relatively new to KSP - I've been playing it for a while, but never bothered to try anything more complex than a Mun landing - mainly because I lack the skills to build something capable of going further without assembling it in orbit, and found docking to be a tremendous pain in the jacksie.

But now I've seen the light and downloaded Mechjeb, and am happy to report success assembling a few components on the beginnings of my first orbital station. It is now my goal to build a ship capable of reaching minmus and deploying a manned lander to the surface, but I'll need your help on these points.

1. How much Liquid/RCS fuel am I going to need to reach Minmus? I'm currently able to stick Rockomax Jumbo-64's into orbit and dock them with my station for later connection to my ship, although to call the whole system inefficient and unwieldy would be an understatement.

2. How should my ship be arranged? Here's a look at the parts I already have....

Here you can see my fairly amateurish station, which maintains a height of almost 300KM on a near-perfect circular orbit around Kerbin. On the right you can see what will be the command module of my ship. I'm planning to connect some kind of fuel tank arrangement to the docking port on the rear of it, followed/preceded by RCS tanks, with an engine assembly being connected last. The docking port on the front is not just a nice system for docking with stations - I'm planning to attach my lander there. Once that whole system is together I'll make my attempt for Minmus, but if you guys could give me any advice on what to include and how I should put it together, it'd be much appreciated. Images and examples would be lovely.

3. Getting heavy parts into orbit is a pain right now. If anyone could share a practical method of getting whopping great fuel tanks/any other heavy parts into Orbit to use on my ship, that'd be swell.

4. Actually assembling the whole thing will probably be a pain too. Help would be appreciated. I'm aware I'll need at least one component with some kind of manned/unmanned command system, some RCS thrusters, and a mono-propellant tank.

I'm more than happy to use addons. As you can see, I'm already using Mechjeb, B9 aerospace, and NovaPunch.

EDIT: Since posting this I've come sent up an RCS tank for the ship, and am in the process of connecting several fuel tanks to the station. I'm planning to send up a fuel tank with an engine to fit to the rear of that RCS tank. The ship's fuel tank and engine will be self-propelled to the station and connected to the ship, at which point I'll fill it up again from the smaller fuel tanks I'm connecting to the station. Once this is done, I'm going to build and send up a lander to attach to the gantry-mounted docking port seen at the front of the command module of my ship.

On the left: refueling tank - the first of several. On the right you can see the RCS tank that I've attached to the Command Module of my interplanetary ship.

Edited May 1, 2013 by DressedInRags