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[Flashzom]

Some Hippy Site calls that (20L) the bare minimum per human per day.

I'm willing to call that negligible...

Considering that death stills obviously wouldn't be the only source of water, it would be stupid to call an entire days worth of water for a person negligible especially if the corpses would otherwise just be allowed to rot in the desert...
Not to mention the fact that our dwarves only use water thus far for drinking. Therefore showering is out, which skews the figures of your reliable "Hippy Site"

Effort Compared to bringing in water on a caravan....  20L = Neglegable in any site within 100km of a water source... perhaps more.  And I bet you could find few places on earth that does not have a water source for 100km in all directions.

a couple camels and a wagon designed to cover desert terrain that is fairly flat, and each wagon could probably deliver 1000L a wagon load.  If they used the conestoga wagon design they could carry about 12000lbs or roughly 4000L/wagon or roughly 200 dead bodies worth of water in a single wagon)

Now I know this would require trade goods to balance the deal, but lets say your fort was the supreme supplier of glass in the region so it could afford the water and could afford the big wagons...

Now

If the wagon train was 5 wagons long (fairly realistic number I think for a trade caravan)... that is now 1000 bodies worth of water...

If the wagon train was able to do a run every 14 days that is now 26000 bodies a year.

if your dwarf fortress is like mine and is 33 years old,  I could have recieved 858000 bodies worth of of water on a caravan.   While I am sure it would have been expensive, I find it hard to believe that my few dwarfs that have died.. maybe 30 or so, would have made any real difference.

I don't care if they get added, but they are complexity for complexity's sake and have no real value.

Well, I'll concede on the point that trade WOULD be a more viable solution, but that takes the whole fun out of disposing of corpses, which people otherwise just let sit around and rot. So evaporating the blood out of the corpses would leave some useful byproducts. And besides, if you can simply import water, where exactly would the challenge come in? Not to mention that the caravans DON'T come every fourteen days. And also not to mention that dwarf time is extremely screwed up to where they'd be lucky to use twenty liters in a year.

[SirHoneyBadger]

I have a question: Is cremation an acceptable practice for dwarfs? I mean intentional cremation (not "Slappy fell into the magma again...").

I don't see why it wouldn't be, but it might be a concern. Since DF is a simulation-among other things-one thing I'm interested in simulating is dwarf culture, and ofcourse that includes burial practices.

For that matter, does it make sense for dwarfs to have any prohibitions against the handling of corpses? Perhaps not prohibitions, but maybe customs/rituals?

Anyone have any thoughts on this?

Ofcourse, this (probably) only pertains to dwarf corpses.

[Pilsu]

Depends on whether it creates a bad thought really. Bridges do


I may seriously have to question your sanity if you actually think still suits and death distilling are based on reality

[Neonivek]

Well... Still suits are sorta based on reality... but the real life still suits are nothing like what was described and are based more on making sure you don't sweat too much then recycling your bodily fluids.