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[Khris]

Is this possible?
Making a trap which somehow pushes an enemy from a tile to the next one when he steps on a pressure plate?
Because while it sounds like a pretty obvious trap, it seems too mighty. You could just make your entrance a row of tiles along each wall with pressure plates and pushing-mechanisms in the wall and in the middle a pit, and when enemies come in, they're just pushed into the pit.

[Quietust]

Nope. It is possible, though, to use weapon traps to trick attackers into dodging into open space, but it won't consistently force them to dodge in the same direction every time.

[Sphalerite]

This can be done to a degree with water, although the physics of how water pushes objects and creatures make it a little bit tricky to set up.  It can also be done with magma, with the additional bonus of incinerating the target.

You can also place a retracting bridge on a flat surface.  When it retracts, creatures standing on it may be flung randomly up to three spaces away.  Not very reliable, but I have in the past build traps which used ledges covered with retracting bridges to fling enemies into nearby pits.

[Khris]

So is there a lag between the pressing of a pressure plate and the reaction of a retracting bridge or a trap?
Like having an enemy step on a plate before the unretracted bridge and then having enough time to step on the bridge before it retracts so that it retracts at the right moment when he's on it?
Or when having the plate connected with a spike on tile ahead?

[Sphalerite]

So is there a lag between the pressing of a pressure plate and the reaction of a retracting bridge or a trap?
Like having an enemy step on a plate before the unretracted bridge and then having enough time to step on the bridge before it retracts so that it retracts at the right moment when he's on it?

Bridges have a 100 tick delay between triggering and opening, so if you have a pressure plate immediately followed by a retracting bridge it is possible to time things so that an enemy steps on the pressure plate, triggers it, then has time to walk onto a bridge before the bridge retracts.  Raising spikes, on the other hand, are instantaneous, so you can't easily have an enemy step on a pressure plate that then triggers a spike when he steps on the spike.  It is possible to build automated spike traps, but takes some clever mechanics.

[Khris]

How long is a tick?

[Fancy Admiral]

A tick and a step and a frame are synonymous.  So when your fortress is new and small and not cluttered, 100 ticks per second is about right.  Later on, this number drops, so you can expect it to take more time in real life.  Things from your perspective slow down.

From the perspective of dwarves, an average speed human takes 10 ticks to move 1 tile (accoring to the wiki, I'm sure someone can show how to derive this from the RAWs).  So from the time the bridge is triggered to the time it changes state, it's not bad to assume things can move at least that far.