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[Corneria]

Removing skin and fat also makes them more vulnerable to regular hits.

[Tevish Szat]

You compensate for that with armor.  Give them a new skin of steel, or candy-coat them if you REALLY want your super-soldiers to shine.

1: Psychological hardening.  This is a good use for your surplus useless dwarves.  create a chamber of death (real upright spikes, DAS, magma) and send the worthless, unconnected migrants into it.  Have one wall consist of clear glass windows and station your super-soldier-trainees on the other side.  turn the chamber on.  They will "witness death" through the windows until they "don't really care about anything anymore".  Since you can control (with burrows) who and how many are sacrificed to teach your soldiers that life is cruel but their masters are crueler, you can carefully control not only the moods of your soliders but the mood of your whole fortress.  I recommend menacing upright spikes, as it allows more drawn out and painful death for the recruits to witness, easy recovery of bodies, and might just make them a little more careful in their danger room.

2: Social Retardation: Until compleat, supersoldiers are kept "active" 24-7.  Supersoldier training range has its own food/booze stockpile that is filled via hatches from above.  Doors to it are forbidden and tightly closed, so that normal idlers do not interfere.  Supersoldiers are accorded individual chambers and no meeting hall.  If they are ever idle, they should idle alone, rusting their social skills

3: Physical Alterations: You'll probably need to get lucky on syndromes for this one: Total numbness and destruction of fat and sensory nerves are your goals, hopefully without blinding/crippling your super soldiers.  Controlled magma-baptism can manage the fireproofing, but will not remove the pain response completely.  Until you have the right vector to infect your soldiers with, that destroys their ability to feel without killing them or ruining them for combat, you will probably have to make due with magma.

[Vicid]

Migrants locked in individual danger rooms that are only let out to go fight won't make friends/won't matter to anyone when thrown away on a FB

[SilentThunderStorm]

Another possibility,here, is to make your potential soldiers responsible for the deaths of the immigrants.  I do not know if this will increase the desired desensitization or not, but it would in the real world, and the developers tend to have a lot of hidden mechanics in this system... it would be reasonable.

A further refinement of the basic premise, for saving on fortress resources:

Have two paths to your fortress from the outside, the shorter path governed by a bridge, the longer path straight through your danger room (for safety, also separate your danger room from direct access to your fortress via bridge... in case something breaks through).

Forget assigning a dwarf to pull the switch repeatedly... have an animal trigger a repeater set of pressure plates, so it is continuous and without any eat/sleep/drink breaks.

The soldiers LIVE in the danger room.

If anything enters your map that you do NOT want to come into your fortress, simply raise the bridge, and they will path through the danger room.  This would include goblins, migrants, and anything else hungry and/or worthless.

If there is anything that visits that you do wish to allow (caravans, the random 'Legendary Weaponsmith', anyone you would rather torment in person, etc.), simply lower the bridge, and they path that way instead.

The soldiers will train all their skills to the max while watching the maximum amount of death possible, including (depending on what wanders by) each other.

The other interesting idea that I saw posted in there somewhere was training up goblin fighters.  I am not sure that this is possible (similar mechanics do exist in other games [like Guild Wars] and I certainly would not put it past Toady to incorporate this), but it would be a very cool way to train soldiers when you get low on migrants (as they will eventually be too afraid to come).

In this case, I would put a soldier against a few well trained gobbies in a glass arena format.

[Tevish Szat]

Another possibility,here, is to make your potential soldiers responsible for the deaths of the immigrants.  I do not know if this will increase the desired desensitization or not, but it would in the real world, and the developers tend to have a lot of hidden mechanics in this system... it would be reasonable.

This might cause loyalty cascade problems.  The last thing you want is "renegade" supersoldiers

[Casp]

That's an alright plan for sure. I think the most intriguing thing here is the removal of skin/fat. We could probably have some sort of well timed rotation of dunking a dwarf in lava and water, so as to boil the skin off without any deaths.

[Broseph Stalin]

That's an alright plan for sure. I think the most intriguing thing here is the removal of skin/fat. We could probably have some sort of well timed rotation of dunking a dwarf in lava and water, so as to boil the skin off without any deaths.

They should probably be naked, if their clothes catch fire they'll keep burning even after the lava is gone.

[Tevish Szat]

For the magma shower, I recommend a 3-z setup.  The bottom level has a magma cistern.  The middle level has a 1x1 room above the cistern, with a (magma safe) floor grate as its floor and a magma-safe door.  The top level has a magma cistern NOT directly above the 1x1 chamber, fed by a small pump stack from the bottom cistern.  There is a 1x1 room over the floor-grate chamber, separated from the upper cistern by a magma-safe floodgate (attached to a lever) with a magma-safe hatch cover (also linked to a lever) as its floor.  To ready the shower, open the floodgate and let the chamber directly above the shower room fill.  Close the floodgate, insert dwarf, and open the hatch cover.  The magma will fall over the dwarf, but down into the lower cistern via the grate.  The dwarf should be burned, but not killed in its wake.  Repeat until desired tissue layers are gone.  I'm not 100% sure falling magma will do the trick, but if it even remotely works it should be a nice, controllable method.  Have a dwarven bathtub on the entrance/exit of the magma chamber and you'll put out any fires rather than tracking them back into the fortress (or dying from the burning).

I might try this on a volcano embark, where I don't have to worry about my comical inability to manage a pump-stack from the magma sea to saner parts of the fortress.

[Dynastia]

I'd be interested to know if dropping a 1/7 magma onto them results in less severe burning than a 7/7. Also, it's very likely that a hospital on standby will be required, as most mishaps involving magma tend to result in massive bleeding. As for Tevish's chamber of death, it should be determined whether wild animals, prisoners and livestock are effective enough ; mass pitting cats or goblins requires far less oversight than finding expendable friendless dwarves, assigning burrows and making peace with their ghosts. I think the assumption is that seeing their friends and relatives die carries more weight than seeing random animals die, but that might only apply to their mood rather than their "cares about nothing" status. In any case, the key here is finding a balance ; you don't want it to be too traumatising and break their fragile little dorf minds (or at the very least force you to put effort into boosting their mood), but you also don't want it to take years to sufficiently harden them.

[SilentThunderStorm]

A problem with that method, however, may be the magma mist generated by such a shower.

[Eddren]

Here's my idea:

Training room in the center.
All around it, the death-chambers, where their loved ones are killed before their very eyes.
Above it, the magma-dripper.
Possibly below it(With a hatch to guard it,) a FB-Syndrom Room.(With the FB being guarded by channels, so that only his Deadly Rot Dust can effect the Soldiers, and the Soldiers can't kill him.)

[qoou]

Make sure one of the more skilled dwarves has a high level in Teaching. I hear that makes a huge difference.

[Eddren]

I doubt the Teaching Skill will make these Dwarves learn anything about butchering their fellow Military-Dwarves.

[franti]

I made a real super soldier program. You need a volcano.
First, give them a barracks, and let them spar, but make sure that every tile is covered in 10x Training Spears. Between that and the normal training they should level up quickly.
Next, you want to get them armoured. I had tons of copper, so I just had my Talented Armorsmith make Copper Mail Shirts all day, and then they'd either be melted down back into Copper Bars or sold to caravans for booze/food (I produced none, but had a large stockpile). After years, and a Copper Boot covered in gems, he was legendary. Same with the Weaponsmith, although that's not as important.
Then, I dug deep enough to hit Granite and mined out the whole layer until I got tons of Cassiterite and Bismuthinite. Now, I'm playing a more realistic version where Iron is called Wrought Iron, and is inferior to Bronze. Old version Steel > Iron > Bonze. My mod version Carbon Steel > Bronze > Pig Iron > Bismuth Bronze > Arsenical Bronze > Wrought Iron.

I had my Metalsmith make suit after suit of armour, and anything that wasn't masterwork was melted down and reused to make another suit. After some time, I set up a leatherworker to make clothing for my dwarves: I don't think a hair-covered dwarf would like to wear chain with nothing under it. Just being considerate. The Naked Mole Dogs I had been breeding were slaughtered for their skins.

Armour: Masterwork Bronze Helm, Leather Hood, Leather Shirt, Masterwork Bronze Chain Mail, Masterwork Bronze Chain Mail, Masterwork Bronze Breastplate, Leather Robe, Masterwork Bronze Gauntlets, Leather Pants, Masterwork Bronze Chain Leggings, Masterwork Bronze Greaves (modded leggings to be non-fitted), Leather Long Skirt (don't judge: it helps), Masterwork Bronze Chausses (sockmail, made it uncommon for dwarves and got lucky), Masterwork Bronze Low Boot (not so lucky here but whatevs), Masterwork Bronze Shield. On top of this, they still ran faster than civilians.

Finally, for weapons, I asked the caravan for steel bars, steel anvils, and steel flasks. Smelted them down and made Masterwork Steel Spears.
Unfortunately, there was no Adamantine on my map (well, like, two levels, but I'm fairly sure that would've opened up the circus).

Now, I had two suits for the. A Training Suit, and Battle Armor. Battle Armor was posted above. Training Armor was a Bronze Helm, Leather Hood, Leather Robe, Bronze Breastplate, and Bronze Gauntlets. Why? Because some of the training spears were replaced with Copper Spears (not made by the masterwork weaponsmith). The dwarves almost always doged them, but occasionally would get cut and rush over to the well-stocked hospital nearby and get sown up. After a few more years, they had more scars than an emo kid, but still never got killed. Toughened them up and kept the Doctors in shape.
 
Then, a goblin siege showed up. I put them all in their battle armour, and opened the gates. The Goblins rushed in, the dwarves rushed out, and it was over in like 5 seconds. I lost 0 out of my 20 soldiers, no goblin survived. I just dumped it all in the magma: I had no use for a crappy Wrought Iron Scimitar.

And yes, teaching/leader/student helps a lot.

[elf-fondling human]

I found it easier just to mod in some Super Dwarves: Slade skin; no fat, bleeding, breathing, eating, drinking, sleeping, fear, thought, or organs; adamantine bones; homogeneous body types/skin/hair/eye colors, and to drop a dust cloud upon death to simulate an explosion.