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My understanding of the Airstream sewer flusher, Doug, is that it had one hole, but it may have changed, or I may have been misinformed. The info came from a member who was quite knowledgeable, but has absented himself from the Forum for a couple of years. I haven't looked inside the tank either and don't plan to. Even with multiple holes, how much of the tank can it hit? I can't answer that either. I suppose one of those miniature TV cameras on a stalk could tell you how well it works and I encourage you to get one and report back. They are also useful when you drop that bolt under into the engine compartment, it gets caught somewhere and you can't see it. If it works better than I thought, or has been changed, good.
Jeanne, I have no knowledge of composting toilets, except—they are a lot smaller than they used to be. They used to be hard to set up and keep going, but I guess that has changed, somewhat. I was looking through a sample wilderness log cabin outside a store a few weeks ago and it had a composting toilet. It was about the same size as a regular toilet. I looked at the links and the composting toilets have improved, but seem only better than an outhouse. There is a lot of maintenance, but perhaps no more than we have now with the black tank. I doubt they come cheap. It looks like the liquid is stored until you can get a bucket and dispose of it under someone else's trailer (not advised). Maybe the liquid could be directed to the black tank, if you have one. Certainly this would work pretty well for extended boondocking, but you'd still be limited by how much water you can bring and how much liquid you can store. Where you can dump on the ground is limited and can get you thrown out of campgrounds. While the forest creatures do not use toilets, they don't leave all of their waste products in one place where it builds up and/or kills vegetation (urine is mildly acidic), so dumping at a campsite is not a good idea. Yes, they used to dig a hole and go to ground, but campsites were not so busy 50 years ago. You'd have to reduce your consumption of Molsons, tea and coffee with a compost toilet.
I don't see this as a solution for many people. Given a small market, there doesn't seem to be the demand that would produce a markedly better composting toilet. Someday it may make sense for everyone. That would be fine, but I expect quite expensive for a while.
However, we also have another possibility—how do they do it on the space station? They must purify the urine and grey water and turn it into potable water. The technology is there, albeit perhaps a bit pricy. I don't know what they do with the solids—maybe compost or incineration (dumping it outside could be problematical the next time you go by). If the idea of drinking purified urine upsets you, consider that much ground water comes from septic (leach) fields and is purified by the earth (hopefully), and then makes its way into nearby wells. We used to live in a subdivision where lots ranged from a 1/4 acre to 1 acre. Leach fields were supposed to be 200' away from wells, but often were 100' or less and grandfathered. The neighbor below me had a well about 75' from our leach field, but I didn't like him anyway. The county required water tests when houses sold or were refinanced, and the tests were always ok, but somewhat limited in scope. We never got any illnesses from this. People do not like to think about this. There are many stories about how when public sewers are brought to such subdivisions, the wells dry up. That also upsets people.
They say that when people get old, they talk about their powers of elimination a lot. It is also said RV owners are usually old. We seem to be proving those two theories.
Gene
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Gene
The Airstream is sold; a 2016 Nash 24M replaced it.
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