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[Trif]

This could be a good use for old clothing. Put a refuse stockpile in the barracks that only accepts from links, drop tattered clothes from above. They land on the stockpile and eventually rot away, recruits get skill and attribute gains and no haulers are put at risk.
Clothes should be light enough to prevent military injuries, it can be automated using minecarts and auto-dumps and, best of all, old clothes are finally useful.

[Reelya]

Can a child be killed by a sock falling 1-Z level? I'd love a child-toughening system

[Xob Ludosmbax]

This is the first thing that comes to my mind. 

You start with a burrow with just the trainee. 

Put a meeting area just under a hatch.  This will cause the trainee to go there whenever idle. 

Put a pressure plate attached to that hatch in the meeting area, so that stepping on the plate opens the hatch.  This will mean that whenever the trainee is idle, the hatch opens, dropping whatever items are on top.

Next, you set up a loading mechanism. 

Put a stockpile on the same tile as the plate, or next to it if that isn't possible.  Set a minecart to load from the stockpile.  Set it to be guided every day.  Set it to dump on top of the hatch.  (build ramps, stops  and track as appropriate.)  Some refinement may be necessary to give the hatch enough time to close before the cart is dumped.

When the dwarf finishes loading, they become idle and receive their daily allotment of socks.  Once the socks are delivered, the dwarf then ceases to be idle and reloads the sock machine.

--

This can be further refined by having a multi z-level path of hatches & plates so that when the dwarf becomes idle after dumping the cart, in order to get to the meeting area, they are forced to walk across the pressure plates opening each hatch in turn. 

I haven't yet tried the dwarven shotgun, so there may be refinements/simplifications possible using that idea.  And if you can create a minecart light enough to not injure the dwarf, that makes the whole plate/hatch/stockpile thing superfluous. 

--

I guess now we know what happens to the socks that disappear when you do laundry. 

[ZeroSumHappiness]

If water works then we could create an automatic water shotgun and stand the recruit on a grate, right?  Shotgun fires water at level Z+1, water falls on recruit on level Z, water falls through grate to level Z-1 to be recycled into the shotgun system?  Hell, do it to a pump operator whose pump output powers a waterwheel that works the shotgun system and you've got a real training gym.  If the dwarf is powering the shotgun then it'll automatically stop killing him if he goes unconscious.  That should improve survivability!  (Heresy, I know.)

[Reelya]

Dwarf pumping water over himself? if that adds any training value, i like the idea.

[wagawaga]

Dwarf pumping water over himself? if that adds any training value, i like the idea.

I don't believe "falling" water does any damage, since in Adv. mode I recall climbing waterfalls without getting injured (that was .40d though), and you're actually throwing the "water" item, not the water tile.
You know, the blue glob called water that goes into buckets, not water water.
You might get a few points in swimming, along with a ton of job cancellations if the dwarf isn't idle.

This thread made me thing of an adventurer training facility: set up the pressure plate triggering the hatch (as suggested a few posts above) so that pebbles are available near the hatch. Pick up and throw pebbles on the hatch till you're legendary thrower, wear full armor and get the experience shower from the pebbles falling on you.
It might kill you if pebbles are heavier than I expect but it's worth a try, especially considering that no sparring in adv mode means every xp point you normally get in armor user is a potentially brain-crushing killing blow from an enemy.

[Xob Ludosmbax]

From Fully Automatic Watergun, "Combat physics treats Water [833] as a giant rock weighing 459, IIRC, heavier than most boulders."

Science is required!

[wagawaga]

From Fully Automatic Watergun, "Combat physics treats Water [833] as a giant rock weighing 459, IIRC, heavier than most boulders."

Science is required!

Ooh, the fact that liquids in carts are stored as items slipped past me. I believe that boulder is a tad heavy for training purposes - the op mentions bruises through copper armor from standard boulders, and the thread you linked successfully bludgeoned goblins to death with water.
It still might make good training for high-level Armor Users with great armor, as long as we can !!Science!! that xp gained scales with damage taken, and that damage still has a low enough casuality rate.
And even if it hasn't, we'll just change "Training" to "Doc Training & Not-so-natural Selection"

Another thing still to be tested is if and how damage and/or xp gained scales with fall height.

[ZeroSumHappiness]

Well, the dwarf can still operate a sock shotgun with his own water pumping if real water is too dangerous for your pussy dwarves.

[Hans Lemurson]

From Fully Automatic Watergun, "Combat physics treats Water [833] as a giant rock weighing 459, IIRC, heavier than most boulders."

Science is required!

Ooh, the fact that liquids in carts are stored as items slipped past me. I believe that boulder is a tad heavy for training purposes - the op mentions bruises through copper armor from standard boulders, and the thread you linked successfully bludgeoned goblins to death with water.
It still might make good training for high-level Armor Users with great armor, as long as we can !!Science!! that xp gained scales with damage taken, and that damage still has a low enough casuality rate.
And even if it hasn't, we'll just change "Training" to "Doc Training & Not-so-natural Selection"

Another thing still to be tested is if and how damage and/or xp gained scales with fall height.

The Boulder-dropping experiment resulted in a BROKEN LEG, not bruising.  Drop only small items.

5. Armor user boost verified in the arena. Steel armored dwarf. 600 items led to "talented armor user 900/1100". 1000 items led to "professional armor user 900/1400". This means 9 xp per item. So you need about 12900 items to reach legendary (someone verify my calcs?). Note very high endurance, willpower gains.

Endurance and willpower?  Hmm...never thought to check those stats, was only paying attention to Toughness and Agility. "Item Dropping" really seems to train up all of the Stats that we value in a soldier.

You will have to deal with the 200 seeds per crop type limit. I'd suggest finding something else besides seeds if you want 1000's at once. Maybe 2000 socks, or other used clothing. That might reduce the number of times this thing has to be reloaded per dwarf. Perhaps quarry bush leaves would be good, since there's no 200 limit on those.

Socks have a certain stylish flair to them given their reputation on the forums.  "Sock Drop Training" has a good ring to it, although that would require a lot of labor and cloth to make them in the thousands.  Quarry bush leaves are a good alternative since they can be mass-produced without difficulty on a farm, and seem not to decay once processed into leaves.  The initial processing requires bags, but once dumped, they are independent of their former bags and will seemingly never be returned to a bag.

This could be a good use for old clothing. Put a refuse stockpile in the barracks that only accepts from links, drop tattered clothes from above. They land on the stockpile and eventually rot away, recruits get skill and attribute gains and no haulers are put at risk.
Clothes should be light enough to prevent military injuries, it can be automated using minecarts and auto-dumps and, best of all, old clothes are finally useful.

Tattered clothing perhaps might have the abundance we are looking for and not be of lethal weight.

AH HA! Quantum stockpile all your refuse/seeds/etc on a bridge over a series of bridges leading vertically downwards. Stand a dwarf on the one unerneath the top, open the top bridge. Move your dwarf down a level, open the next bridge. Repeat all the way down, then have a chain of minecarts to stockpile it back at the top.
Whatever method you use to load the stockpile, it's many drops for the price of one.

Many drops for the price of one? I like this idea.  I've been using a hatch since it responds quickly and doesn't seem to toss items the way a bridge does, but having multiple layers of "Item Drop Training Grounds" could certainly reduce the hauling cost of this training method.  Can a Barracks designation extend over a hatch?  If not, it might be difficult to get your dwarf to stand still in the proper location.  "Defend Burrows" for a 1 tile burrow seemed to have them just stand off to the side as though they had merely been issued a "move" command to go there.

Additional research is required.

(I fixed formatting errors after looking through the thread like a year after the post)

[Reelya]

What happens if you drop a dwarf and items at the same time from the same tile? Do the items hit the dwarf, or do they fall first?

If that was workable, you'd only have to worry about burrowing the dwarf on the very top level.

[Hans Lemurson]

What happens if you drop a dwarf and items at the same time from the same tile? Do the items hit the dwarf, or do they fall first?

If that was workable, you'd only have to worry about burrowing the dwarf on the very top level.

You'd run the risk of injuring your dwarf that way.  I think 1z falls can still hurt, even in armor.

[NCommander]

Also, a child not wearing anything on his head was killed by a falling seed

Is no one else bothered that a SEED killed a dorf by falling on their head?!

No wonder beatings are so incredibly lethal ...

[MonkeyHead]

I just killed a fisherdwarf by dropping small corpses on him to see the effect. It was a dead cat that did him in.

[Hans Lemurson]

Yeah, ARMOR MATTERS.

Don't drop things on a Dwarf unless they are wearing METAL ARMOR.