Okay, I'm not a big star trek fan, but I always thought the holodeck idea was cool.  How about putting a holodeck inside stations where you can setup and simulate battles between different types of ships, setups, and tactics?  This way you can test your ship setup against a simulated pvp opponent without actually losing your ship.  This would help the new players really understand what every piece of equipment does and a lot about what tactics to use.  Might be a good way to increase the confidence in new and old players to risk flying outside high-sec space.  It would be like playing a video game..inside a video game.

Im looking beyond the 1v1 practice for this system.  Everyone knows they can practice against a corpmate.  Im also talking about practicing in battles with and against multiple ships which you can't easily organize and customize.  Besides, trying to get your corpmate to fit and unfit modules time after time so you can test against them is really annoying and wastes their time.  This would let the user customize their adversary from their skill level right down to the modules on their ship.  Its about having a controlled environment where you can efficiently test setups and tactics.  It might also be neat if you could bring other corpmates into practice so you can practice as a fleet.  Wouldn't it be great if you could get all your corpmates who are online into a practice no matter where they are in the eve universe?  They wouldn't have to be physically in the same system/station.  It would make fleet practice many times easier.

Cheers,

Rattler

I voted no because you can basically achieve this by undocking and going at it with a corp mate. 

Im looking beyond the 1v1 practice for this system.  Everyone knows they can practice against a corpmate.  Im also talking about practicing in battles with and against multiple ships which you can't easily organize and customize.  Besides, trying to get your corpmate to fit and unfit modules time after time so you can test against them is really annoying and wastes their time.  This would let the user customize their adversary from their skill level right down to the modules on their ship.  Its about having a controlled environment where you can efficiently test setups and tactics.  It might also be neat if you could bring other corpmates into practice so you can practice as a fleet.  Wouldn't it be great if you could get all your corpmates who are online into a practice no matter where they are in the eve universe?  They wouldn't have to be physically in the same system/station.  It would make fleet practice many times easier.

Rattler

mmm .. dont think they`ve invented a smart enough AI to replace the human opponent .. not sure if this will help you much but you can always log into the test server (singularity ) and have a go there against human opponents.

I think it's a great idea. With the new plans to make it so you can walk around space stations this feature would be a great addition to that expansion, and would be relatively simple to program, as most of the features are already in the game (it being a space simulator), basically all you'd just need to make a new GUI for the simulator facility. As you say this would help new players into the game and allow them that steep learning curve without wasting time and money on poor equipment choices, and combat inexperience.  Also it'll allow them to become more familiar with combat again multiple opponents and learn what sort of punishment there ship can take and give out.