[Nuttyman54]

Regardless of what your mechanism is, you cannot put the minibot within the base perimeter projection until 10 seconds hits. Therefore, the "Deployment time" as being discussed here is equivalent to the discrete amount of time for DEPLOYMENT as defined in the manual: the time it takes from when your minibot breaks that projection, to when it starts to climb the pole and leaves contact with the hostbot. This is a non-trivial amount of time if you are talking about the total time it takes from the 10 second mark to when the tower is triggered.

If you have a minibot which can climb the pole in 1 second, but it takes 0.5 seconds for the hostbot to get the minibot from the edge of the tower base to the pole, you still don't hit that tower until 8.5 seconds left in the match at best. You can have all sorts of mechanisms that extend and latch or do whatever to prepare for the endgame before 10 seconds, but no one's minibot is going to get around the time it takes to travel those 15 inches to the pole from the edge of the tower base. If you have a super fast minibot, you best have a super fast way to get it to the pole or you won't beat the slightly slower minibot with the faster deployment.

Will we see minibots that take a second or less to get to the top of the pole? Maybe. Will we see minibots that trigger their tower before 9 seconds left in the match? Very very slim to impossible.