It would be nice to be able to go head to head with each other, hammer and tongs, without taking actual damage. It could be a command similar to "/duel," but when two parties agreed to "/practice," it would prevent each from damaging the other. Score would still be kept, but the virtual "damage" would just revert back to 100% after a virtual "kill." You might even want a temporary "virtual damage" bar in the HUD. It may even be cool to keep score of these virual kills.

Of course, this would represent only a temporary agreement between the two players participating. Other players would presumably still be able to damage them. It would also not affect duel stats in any way.

This would save monumentally on equipment costs, but more importantly, the TIME spent actually reverting to stations to re-purchase your ship. More to the point, it would provide an unbroken, extended opportunity for practicing pvp combat in a one-on-one format. It would be especially useful in mentoring.

friendly fire rule...just practice your PvP with people of your nation.

Yeah, but with friendly fire, you just can't hit anyone of your nation, right? So how are you going to be able to tell what is effective and what's not? How can you tell if the shot would hit?

Or training blasters?

Non...........lethal...........pvp???

I don't get it!!!

Nah just kidding. I can see this being useful during PVP training.

Sparring is great practice anyhow. It's not like a quantified damage indicator would help much anyway - if you know your weapons, it's pretty easy to tell who's winning, and the object should really be to just not get hit at all, right?

You can see and hear the impact on your hull when you're hit, so it's not a problem of knowing that much.

I agree. FF sparring is already sufficient for training, you can tell when you are hit, you can learn to dodge, you can learn to aim & hit.
As for equipment costs and time :
Death is _NOT_ costly in VO, you are encouraged to PvP properly.
The ships and equipment are cheap, the money is plentiful and easily earned.
If you set [HOME] correctly, there is just 1 jump until resuming your PvP battle. If you learn how to dodge, the time spent dogfighting will exceed the time spent respawning and flying to the RDV point.
You want to keep score: duel. Or full-on fight the other nations.
Non-lethal-PvP : sounds like a non-sequitur to me.

There are other threads and posts suggesting this idea and I have always been a fan of it. It's not because equipment is expensive but because if there was a practice mode, we could make ships and equipment more expensive, thus making real non-concensual combat and death more meaningful.

People used to duel "to the red" for non-lethal practice. That is you stop fighting when either player goes lower than 20%. And if you don't want to record the outcome of the duel, just abort it. Voilà!

meh, I would prefer the devs to work on stuff far more relevant than this.

It has been said that FF-Off will eventually be removed, and when such a time comes I presume the devs will have non-lethal weapons available for the players to use in practice. Until then, enjoy one of the few actual benefits of FF-Off.

What if the /duel command took arguments?

e.g. /duel challenge <player> 20

You have challenged <player> to a duel to 20%

How about training weapons? I saw a thread before that talked about training blasters for each gun type (and rockets) and I remember incarnate saying it was going to be a part of the FF/Faction changes.

I support the idea of training weapons. It could be thus that only opponents who also sport training weapons can be 'damaged', this could be implemented using a second hp bar, perhaps, and once that is depleted, your weapons stop doing 'damage' to any other player using training weapons (but do not start doing damage to others).

Given the number of weapons out there, I think "training weapons" would be a needlessly complicated way of doing it. I think it would make far more sense to mediate the fight through the "ships' computers," based on the sort of real armament one has. The computer can provide the pyrotechnic special effects through the HUD holography suite.

We already have "training" weapons.

The SCAR Shop sells them at 1k/pop.

Point taken Borogove, but that does not collide with my idea. Maybe weapons should have a 'no damage' setting.

I only dislike dying because of the camera rotation after you die. For some reason, it agitates me to hell. Remove that and there's only the "aww, I died".

I'd pay 100,000 for a pair of training neutron blasters.