I've just been doing some calculations, and it looks like the lower decks of even a small ship have plenty of opportunity for horribleness. For example, a ship of 25,000 crew can easily produce 2 and a half thousand tonnes of sewage, wastewater, and industrial effluent a day. Given the kind of damage a ship can suffer in combat, imagine the situation is the Main Vats are ruptured. The Great Brown Flood of M41.230 would go down in shipboard history.

And of course, there's the risk of hullghasts, boreworms, maw leechs, etc. What other sort of things can I put down there to make the Explorers feel the need for a long hot shower, afterwards?

Drhoz said:

Well, everything your would regularly think of in regard to the mentioned enviroenment will all but the most hardened scummer a run for the showers!

...but please remember that the ship will not store all the waste but will either recycle it or simply vent it into space. Nothing else makes sense. But you can still have large "sewer vaults".

...but what was the formula you used to get 2.500 tons? And where did you get it from?

Its probably about right, when I did some freelance stuff years ago for a game and researched the bare requirements, it roughly works out about 130kg of water and food per person, per 1000hrs... if you have very high recycling rates for the water and don't bathe! Yarrh, welcome aboard the Pig Boat!

As for the great brown flood, Conjunctivitis, Diarrhea, Giardia and various parasitic intestinal worms are my suggestions if you want something simple, extremely uncomfortable and can't be solved with a gun.

Gregorius21778 said:

Just used the the average water consumption per household, here in Australia, and rounded down a bit. And yes, of course they'll recycle it, but that takes time, and they have to recycle it somewhere Not a prestigious posting, I suspect

MKX said:

MuaHaHAHa, my players are going to hate me

There's a scene in Relentless that deals with precisely this sort of thing- after every other recycling process has been applied, the waste is gradually dumped into vats and slave ratings sift through the slop by hand for any small things that may be valuable enough to warrant reclaiming before the whole mess gets boiled by plasma run-off and compressed to reclaim as much of the water as possible before the remaining ash plug gets blown into space.

Alasseo said:

Excellllant...

And, of course, there's all the water that humans exhale - it's a real problem in underground archeological sites, and even more so on spacecraft - and condensers whilst hey can certainly extract it from the air, extract all the other volatiles as well - the output from a condenser would be foul , without further recycling