RCS Fuel running out to fast?

[Sathurn]

I trying to practice docking, and I seem to be using up a lot of RCS fuel.

How many RCS tank do you guy have on your orbitals? Does SAS reduce the firing by the ASAS? How many thrusters do you use?

[Giggleplex777]

I usually use 4 thrusters and 2 radial RCS tanks. I seem to never run out.

[Spatzimaus]

You don't want to have ASAS turned on at the same time as RCS. The ONLY time they should both be on is when you're trying to damp out the rotation of a really huge object.

Otherwise, it'll fire the jets for every little twitch, and you'll run out of fuel quickly.

[chainedlupine]

SAS modules seems to make little to no difference if you have SAS+RCS enabled. In other words, your craft will immediately start using RCS spurts to try to stop the rotation (because you have an ASAS module), which can cause a rather nasty oscillation if you have a large and/or imbalanced craft.

However, SAS modules do make a different if you have SAS turned on, but leave RCS off. The SAS module will stop your rotation.

On thing that can help is to aggressively manage the RCS toggle. If you merely leave RCS on all the time and then perform orientation maneuvers, you will be using RCS fuel when technically you could perform the maneuver with just your capsule/probe's internal flywheel alone.

The other thing is to balance your RCS thrusters more carefully, which can be difficult to do when you have a large ship with a shifting center of mass.

[CalculusWarrior]

Try getting into the habit of toggling RCS on and off; add a SAS module and use that to reorient your spacecraft. The main use of RCS when docking is translation, so use it wisely. Also, you might be able to remove a few RCS ports from your ship, as sometimes you don't need a whole lot, especially with a small craft. If all else fails, just add more radial tanks or consider upgrading to the massive tank.

Hope this helps.