This I have to admit doesn't particularly concern me. When you're talking about half a million dollars of hardware (retail value of a 5 GW arc reactor/repulsor combo, given our markup), based on cutting edge rocket science research, I'd be actually rather depressed if you didn't get a decent particle beam weapon out of it. Ironically, it's probably this issue, along with our own demonstration of the Repulsor's weaponizability, that made the difference in terms of votes.
Another bit of irony here, because it's mostly the Arc Reactor that makes this combo such a problem. Without such an absurdly powerful, compact power source, the Repulsor would be far too wasteful to be worth using in such a fashion. Again, though, we're talking about half a million dollars of hardware; if you have that kind of scratch to put into a terrorist attack you can do better than a single ballistic round.
This does bring up two interesting questions, regarding tech levels. Currently there exists exactly one level of Repulsor tech, at least on the thruster side, and it seems to be able to do it all, to thrust at its maximum capacity indefinitely. There's no required cooldown; there's no heat buildup or vibration issues; there's no instability introduced when you run the thing at maximum thrust capacity for a long period of time; you can just thrust and thrust forever. As you've just noted, this seems like a little too much power for a single 400-point tech. Maybe we need to introduce some limitations into the level 1 Repulsor tech that has fewer of the high-level abilities that currently make the SA so nervous, and create more levels that can actually do the things you're worried about? In fact, we can ape some of the ideas out of Stark Transcendent's tech tree here: our current Repulsor tech should actually be about the same as the level that thread's currently developed to, which gives us plenty of room to grow (including Unibeams! I really want to build Unibeams!)
The other thing is, most of the proliferation issues you're bringing up stem from the fact that we're not really using the Repulsor to its maximum capacity in any of our current products: neither the Tiger nor the Accipiter is designed to even go past Mach 1 in atmosphere, for example. This "battleship round in your pocket" idea relies on being able to pry a Repulsor out of its housing and jailbreak it to run faster, hotter, and longer than we ever planned on it running in either of those two products. If I were the one designing those products, I would have never included Repulsors with jailbroken capabilities that powerful in the first place; it seems to me that Revy would do the same, not least because a Repulsor with lower maximum capabilities should be cheaper.
I can't even remember how that conclusion was reached; was it something about hypersonic drag?
