Why are there no toilets on the starship 'Exciting Undertaking'?

Question

DISCLAIMER: Any resemblance to other starships (living or dead) is purely coincidental.

The starship 'Exciting Undertaking' is a brand new ship about to set off on a five and a bit year mission to explore mostly new lands and go where only a couple of people have gone before. As space is boring, it has wrap capability (no, not warp, wrap), and to relieve some of the mundanity of existence it also has Duplicators (like replicators but completely different) and Translocation technology (which moves people from place to place by overloading the Plot Buffers).

The one thing it needs, oh noble starship designer, is a method to avoid any main cast crew member needing to leave for a bathroom break.

As many suggestions as possible are needed to make sure that there are multiple redundant systems in case something new needs to break in an entertaining and mildly perilous manner.

Answer 1

Recycling via Teleportation

The ship's medical computer continuously scans the pressure on every cast crew member's bladder and rectum.

As soon as the pressure reaches a set level, the contents are immediately (and almost painlessly) teleported directly to the food replicators.

As illustrated:

(any resemblance to currently or past serving starship officers is entirely coincidental)

Quite neatly killing two birds with one turd stone.

Answer 2

The ultimate expression of Translocation technology would be to simply eliminate much of the starship and carry the people as patterns in the buffer assembly. Once the plot location has been reached, the computer translocates the ship's heroic crew members and a few selected Redshirts to the location, so they can carry out their assigned roles...

The advantage of this is when the crew is translocated back aboard they can be stored in the pattern buffer, and "edited" so they will be fully loaded with glucose and whatever other life sustaining chemicals and nutrients are needed for their species, medical damage repaired (i.e undoing broken bones, removal of disease organisms) and of course waste products are removed both in bulk and at the cellular level. The conscious and unconscious memories are downloaded into the ships permanent memory storage for editing and post production work...

The starship will no longer be an aircraft carrier sized construct full of open spaces for the crew, but more likely resemble a server rack with lots of external hard drives or flash drives attached.

The only sinks we need here are heat sinks

Of course, depending on the plot elements involved, the amount of energy you are willing to expend and so on, even a very modestly sized construct could be used to Translocate entire armies onto a planet. Translocation technology is such a mind blowing concept that was never fully explored. Even this little post only scratches the surface of the possibilities that translocation offers.

Answer 3

Your duplicators may be capable of supporting the crew's dietary needs on this new advanced starship, but we didn't always have things so easy.

Humans are incredibly inefficient creatures, and messy ones at that. In the earlier days of space travel, carrying enough supplies to sustain a crew on extended deep space missions was a serious challenge. People fussed about with hydroponics bays for growing food, atmosphere recyclers and waste re-processors, but as ships got bigger and missions got longer, all these complex systems became a major headache for systems engineers. Nobody wanted to design space toilets when they could be testing the next-generation of wrap engines! If only they could just fix the pesky humans that were at the heart of the problem, and make them less messy and inefficient in the first place...

And then, eureka! It was invented: the solutions to all of 22nd century Earth's interstellar sanitation problems. I present to you, the C.A.N.: the Contained Abdominal Network. This brilliant piece of directed-evolution technology not only eliminates your need for elimination, but also decreases your food and water requirements. It works by culturing a special strain of genetically engineered bacteria in special capsules throughout your gut. To these wee beasties, one man's trash is another bacterium's treasure. In exchange for what is, to them, the perfect habitat, they metabolize human waste into useful nutrients, a fraction of which they recirculate into the bloodstream. After a few cycles through the C.A.N., there's nothing left of the body's natural waste but good old fashioned methane gas. Additional measures may need to be taken to compensate for the increased volume of gaseous discharge.

With the C.A.N. managing your bowels, you'll be more free than ever to explore the cosmos efficiently and cleanly. Now offering free insertions for all crews! It won't hurt, we promise.

Answer 4

Just Use TP

Why not use the TP like everybody else does? Oh, you might not realize TP stands for "teleportation portals".

They are simple and friendly to use--just insert an ergonomically delightful portal device into any orifice that might offend and voila, no more trips to the bathroom! In no time at all the whole crew can be ready for a full episode of bathroom-break-free entertainment!

TP is clinically proven to be safe, friendly and easy to use. Even lactose-intolerant Klingers-On can breath easy with TP caressing their innards.

"I've never felt so confident in my whole life!" - Wharf, buttermilk lover

"Crew productivity is up 13.5% now that TP is standard issue!" - Captain Smirk

Go Boldly With TP!

Answer 5

SPOILER ALERT! The entire crew are robots... but they don't know it!

(Of course a "spoiler alert" is a well known Confederation signal to indicate galley stores are nearing their expiration dates, not to be confused with an attempt to alert the reader that there are plot spoilers ahead, because this is information about a totally real starship. Sorry, I see how you might have been confused there, but the milk is about to go off and the crew does like to have cereal in the morning.)

Any civilized race that's gotten the need to climb and plant flags on things "because it's there" knows that dragging your meat bodies around in space involves a lot of pesky extra weight and plumbing and all that food and water and air and... you know. It's much cheaper and more efficient to send robots.

But robots are, well... robotic. They can't be expected to handle the unexpected. They can't know what it's like to have feelings, to wonder, to... LOVE!!! And that leads to the endemic problem of robotic space depression on long, lonely missions.

Instead, as an outgrowth of the virtual reality video game and automated call center industries, the Confederation has created AI so nearly human they respond to exploration scenarios as a human crew would 67% of the time. 32% of the time they do better. And 1% of the time they explode. (All Confederation technology explodes in a shower of sparks and fire when damaged or confused to avoid capture by the enemy. Don't get a flat in a Confed car.)

The trick is the AI thinks it's real, right down to emulating human fears, and psychological and physiological problems. They have "doctors" who wave glowing devices over their bodies, or prescribe pills and shots, that do nothing but transmit the signal for self-repair. All to keep the AI's construct of being a real human intact so they will behave like a real human.

This is why Confederation "crews" behave so eerily perfect. Emotions that would negatively impact a five year mission in close quarters are toned down, while ones that would help are turned up. Emotions such as feelings of jealousy, post-traumatic stress disorder, independent goals, and annoyance are reduced. Comradery, optimism, obedience, duty, and sharing are turned up. Everyone is happy to wear the same clothes and do the same things day after day after day after day after day...

Sometimes this is taken a bit too far. AI that have been away too long start speaking of an idealized society that doesn't need money with no fighting or poverty. These sad cases are nonetheless allowed to continue in their duties to spread positive Confederation propaganda.

Answer 6

Multipurpose Elimination Room

As everyone knows, space is at a premium on space ships. (no pun intended)

Why would you commit a section of everyone's quarters to take up an incredible amount of precious costly space? You need a multipurpose room that can be a toilet when you need it and a jazz club when you want to get funky with your trombone. Enter the holodeck! As a bonus you can rig up fantastic direct mind stimulation games so you don't need to play snake on your tricorder.

Answer 7

I. Improved food

Finally, they are here. The nutricapsules are scientifically designed to be 100% absorbed by the guts, leaving no organic rests to be "disposed of".

This allows your spaceship to store enough food for the mission in just a few modules, with no need of the extra weight associated with traditional food, as:

• food that is only useful in 25% of the weight (if lucky).

• facilities for storing the food and/or grow more.

• facilities for waste treatment (including WC) and recycling.

Some minor inconveniences are the adaptation periods before and after such a diet, to train again your digestive system to deal with traditional food.

II. WC at battle stations

If the objective you are after¹ is ensuring that nobody leaves their post while they are on duty due to "technical emergencies", then the other way around is make everything (at least in control positions) a WC.

Technical suits have the appropiated "connectors", both to the wearer's body and the control chairs, allowing a unconspicuous, odorless and silent "emergency evacuation". While most astronauts prefer the solution with pill foods and think of this solution as a solid #2 (if you get what I mean), more than one has found this method surprisingly useful when fighting against overwhelming numbers of flesh-eating Zampas.

III. Surrogate crew members

Space travel is long and dangerous, and a body subject to it will suffer greatly if not properly protected. But to be effective, regular work in unsafe places of the ship is required, and robots are just not effective enough yet.

So the crew members are safely stored in a semi-stasis state, with their body functions unoperative until it is time to end the journey. Their mind, though, is fully functional and is wired, through the ship systems, to a robot "crew member" that he will direct with his thought. To improve control, the robot will be anatomically very similar to human.

While functional, this arrangement was object of some criticism due to the long, long hours of boredom while the robot work was not needed. In an effort to alleviate them, the last generation of robots has been granted the ability to drink beer and has had some modifications done to the body, adding to the design certain parts that were left out from previous versions due to their lack of perceived usefulness and a certain degree of puritanism by the builder.

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¹It is not clear from the OP which is the author's intent.

Answer 8

No toilets because of some sort of...

Active recycling matrix - standard issue, compulsory. Two types - partially inserted or close quarters. Waste is eliminated at point - the crew are free to relieve themselves with all but a few molecules being instantly captured and transformed into photons. An occasional flash of light is all.

Answer 9

I suggest creative use of the duplicator: when a crew member feels the need for a bathroom break you throw her/him overboard and replace him/her with a duplicate that's identical except for an empty bladder/stomach.

Answer 10

An option is to have 'waste collection' incorporated into the suits/uniforms worn by the crew on the ships. You could even go as far as giving the waste a purpose. (On board agriculture which needs nutrients, nutrients abundant in human waste). This also solves the problem of your crew visiting a planet that prohibits them from taking off the suit (toxic atmosphere/radiation hazards). And it could set up with entertaining/mildly perilous situations when the system is at capacity and the crew member has to go.

Answer 11

Temporal bifurcation closets (TBC).

These toilets, present on every starship, are always meticulously clean. Firstly because of all the other systems available, but secondly because no-one ever actually uses them. At least the second time around.

When a crew member needs to relieve themselves they will go (as you might expect) to the TBC. Once their waste is deposited the TBC will rewrite the history of the waste, right back to it's creation in the repliduplicators, ensuring that the crew member never needs to go in the first place.

"But!" some of you may cry "Then surely the crew member never ate at all! Also Paradoxes!" At which point you may be reminded of the well Known Tennants Timey-Wimey-Ball effect and directed to the nearest Starflotilla Educational Institution.

Answer 12

Having once been dumped in a peacetime military, I discovered two things. Firstly, stress makes you need to go, and army food tends to... clog up the pipes, so to speak.

Considering mass is at a premium on any space ship, I'd propose that food on a starship would be high energy, low mass food, low volume that expands to be filling, and takes a very long time to digest, and does so with minimum waste matter and maxium caloric intake over an extended period of time. Once digested, the food goes back to its original low volume, reducing the need to find the ... comforts of the throne of thought as often. Since there's no real volume of food, there's nothing to output in times of stress.

This in turn reduces the need for toilet facilities, while maintaining a happy healthy workforce, with only a slight chance of sudden violent diarrhea and painful death.

Both these result in greater efficiencies, since you can store the food in smaller spaces and need less space for post consumer food.

Answer 13

Being a crew member is a very "exciting" undertaking

While there are advanced scifi explanations for why will evolve beyond the need to poop, there is also a simpler and more low-tech explanation. Anyone who smelt the air in Victorian era London would know that a need to poop does not imply the existence of toilets. Perhaps instead of being a shiny cybernetic utopia, the future is literally a crapsack dystopia.

Every week civilian starships with boring names like "The Enterprise" meet aliens that are about to destroy the universe, galaxy or at least the ship. This is no regular starship, this is the Exciting Undertaking which faces annihilation at least ten times every hour long episode.

When friend computer designed the ship it forgot that meatbags nee understood that the highly valued human crew would be terrif excited by the suicida bold mission on which they were sent. As such the crew would vacate their waste product storage organs quite frequently during their insa regular duties. As such the death tra ship is equipped with diapers crapsacks and brown trowsers rather than toilets.

Answer 14

1. The crew are surgically altered before launch to have larger internal cavities for waste storage. They no longer have urgent needs to go to the bathroom and can stay on duty for as many days as modern future drugs can keep them awake. Waste evacuation can happen whenever the plot needs them to leave their stations for other purposes.

2. The crew are surgically altered to connect their insides to their outsides [WARNING, PSYCHOLOGICALLY ICKY, BUT NOT ACTUALLY GORY]. When necessary, they can 'plumb in' to a drainage system. Human precedent exists, and that's because I don't want to link or consider the genuine human precedent.

3. Part of the spaceship exists in subspace, hyperspace, another dimension, a phase shift. But not the left half or the right half or the top half - the bottom half. People below the waist, their feet, the floor, are out of sight, out of smell and out of mind.

4. People have iPads gone mad. They do need bathroom breaks but it doesn't mean they abandon their duties mid fight, since the duties can be brought to the bathroom with them. Holoportation so the crew still see them sitting at their original posts is an optional extra.

5. The crew doesn't eat. Like Sam Rockwell in the film Moon, there are endless clones. They wake up, live until they die of dehydration, are disposed of and replaced with a clone. No food, no bathroom break. Very Matrix as well. This point has the advantage that it fits your "no bathroom breaks" clause to the letter, while not fitting the spirit of "no interruptions to a long situation", which is a perfect nitpick ;)

6. The crew doesn't eat, but for a much more mundane handwavy reason: nanobots. Yes, their bodies contain more nano than an entire series of Mork and Mindy, and that fixes the problem. How, you ask? Shutup, are you saying there's a problem nanotechnology can't fix? Do you wanna fight?

7. They are Borg-style human brains but supported and animated by non-biological matter. Cyborgs, robo-bodies, mechanical life support systems, they're not really people at all. Before launch their bodies are put into suspended animation. Electric life is introduced, it runs in the pre-existing neurological patterns in their brains, like a tram following a human-behaviour-shaped tramline. Shadow humans mimicking the bodies they exist in; stasis-bodies have no muscle control, but they can be animated by the ship's internal tractor beams like a futuristic stop-motion. From the outside, you'd never know the difference.

8. Wow, did you say no bathroom breaks? Because I totally didn't just go to the bathroom. You can tell that I didn't go just then, because no time passed between when I was just here, and when I am still here so there isn't even a 'then' for you to be referring to.

Answer 15

The ship I’m designing for a (hopefully) novel does not have toilets. It’s simply a special case of not having any “life support” overhead for creatures like us. It’s crewed by post humans existing as software and is a completely solid structure.

More generally, your crew is not beings like us. They don’t have the concept of a toilet. After all, we don’t do anything special with all the CO₂ we exhale — maybe they are like clams which don’t need to go off somewhere to pee, or like oak trees which simply don’t eliminate waste in such a manner. Maybe they digest externally and leave behind inetable parts when they pull their stomoch back in, or suck out the juces from a carcass from which they previously injected enzymes: they have leftovers, not poop.

Answer 16

Matrix Squiddies are the answer

Miniaturized versions of these lovely robots roam the command bridge of the Exciting Undertaking.

The tentacles of the squiddy have an aspirator device on their tips, while all the uniforms dressed by crew members have a comfortable rear flap. So, through the flap the squiddy can access the person's orifices with its tentacles and empty all the biological waste inside!

Answer 17

Nanobots make your clothes functional, especially for this purpose

They are incorporated in the underwear which looks a bit like a diaper from inside (only much smaller and more fashionable) but instead of just taking up the waste and storing it the nanobots immediately transform it into nothingness just producing a nice odor (roses or so) and some heat (second law of thermodynamics if this still applies). Everyone is used to it from birth on. That's why it's absolutely normal.

Answer 18

Bathrooms are not needed because of the way food is delivered. Inside their uniforms they have dispensers which have sensors to detect activity levels and consumption. They exact measure and inject the right amount of nutrients into the blood stream, bypassing the whole digestion process.

For liquid waste products we would have catheters and vagina cups connected via hose down through our pants legs into our shoes. The bottom of the shoe would have a connector which would seamlessly connect to port in the floor that could be placed anywhere. Of course under their stations where the sit on the bridge, in front of turbo lifts and anywhere else it was convenient. Of course the system would automatically clean and sterilize all tubes as necessary.

Everyone lives happily every after, except.... This is the USS Exciting Undertaking and not the USS boring.

On our ship mysterious malfunctions (tricksters), have offered incentives (bribed) the right people and learned about certain vulnerabilities (Darn that password was never changed). People would randomly be flushed with hot, and then cold flushing, sterilizing, and fluids. Hey aliens need to go to, and so the system will have to offer a wide variety of customizable options. Pranksters (crew members) would accidentally (shove) bump others on to the connection points in the middle of conversations and speeches for all kinds of laughs. A secret point system would evolve to rate the cleverness, and the shock on the persons face when they got hit.

Of course some might get reported, but due to other malfunctions the reports will be sent at sub light speeds and get back to earth(home base) long after it was too late to do anything about it.

Now about the showers.....

**password**

add lotion xxx alias required anti-bacterial wash.

<new password>

<lock>

sure got Exciting around there.

Answer 19

Instead of toilets, modern spaceships have "Head" rooms.

Which serve the same purpose.

Sources (detailing this for totally different, yet surprisingly similar spaceships):

http://www.cracked.com/article_24170_9-hilarious-background-details-star-trek-nobody-notices.html

https://books.google.ca/books?id=ge_QJ2eM3KcC&pg=PT16&lpg=PT16&dq=star+trek+the+next+generation+door+labelled+head&source=bl&ots=DQukMMl3ud&sig=5INOOI2cJM429uTPNrFRvkgI4eM&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjzwqeYqrTMAhWDWD4KHZ1SBqwQ6AEIRDAJ#v=onepage&q&f=false

Answer 20

With environmental control and force fields, they don't have to protect them selves against the cold, or injuries, so your crew is naked all the time, or their uniforms have but flaps, if some decency is to be maintained. The floor is laid out with straw. When a member of the crew, maybe a centaur had to go, robots exchange the straw at that place. The used straw, along with the waste is turned back into energy by the translocator and new straw is duplicated. There would be ways to deal with a 0G situation, but I encourage you not to think about them.

This allows your crew to boldly go where no one has gone before.

Answer 21

To take a dump where no man has dumped before:

There are no toilets, but there are force-curtains (which are like force-fields only not) everywhere, whenever somebody needs to go he just walks up to the nearest window and leans his butt against it, this activates the window transform sequence which then proceed to wrap around his butt and senses whenever something comes out of it, that something then gets passed through the force-curtains to outerspace.

Answer 22

Humanoid robots would be made that need waste for energy (http://mashable.com/2012/11/29/ecobot-iii/#kRXzS7kdlgqg).

They would then be programed with the emotional need "mate" with the crew, acquiring material they need to live.

The importance of not letting your other crew members die (robots would be sufficiently advanced to have a personality), paired with the embarrassment of making a mess, should make it feel natural - turning a boring almost negative task (getting rid of waste, waste of time) into a positive (giving life).

Further, crew may be paired with robot counterparts, or they may even be proactive in helping the crew - scanning a person, they would then approach them and say "May I relieve you of your duties?" - This could happen on the spot if needed and no interruption of work would happen.