The nature of "repulsor burns"

[shariangel.livejournal.com]

Ok, so with the large number of fics (and comparatively small number of comics) I've read, plus movies, cartoons and the like, I've found more than a few references to "repulsor burns".

Now, most of these seem to be referring to something aking to a friction burn, and that makes a lot of sense to me, but a few seem to be more of a heat burn. The only real canon source I've seen so far where anyone's been seriously hurt by repulsors is Extremis, so any help would be great!

(The bigbang tag is because I need to know this so I can beta a fic properly :/ )

Comments

[melannen.livejournal.com]

I would say that they don't generate heat primarily - they don't, after all, set things on fire when he takes off - but friction does generate heat, and if he needed to melt/burn/weld something with them, Tony Stark could probably use his knowledge of Physics! to do it. (I wouldn't be surprised if the repulsor beams generate a certain amount of heat just by friction with the air in fact.)

[shariangel.livejournal.com]

I can see that, but I don't know about melting unless it comes under "comic book science, comic book science, it just does that ok?"

[melannen.livejournal.com]

Well, yeah, I can't see him, like, blasting at a pile of metal and melting it to slag, but if he had to, say, melt through a metal door or something, I suspect he could generate a lot of heat just by angling a repulsor beam to skim right over the edge of it, so the friction heat goes into the metal, and keeping the beam going for several minutes or so, without even having to jigger the electronics.

(If you need him to be able to melt a pile of metal into slag just by aiming the repulsors at it, I would go for some kind of interference effect between two different repulsor beams, where they are pushing against each other and the extra energy gets dumped as heat. Crossing the streams, as it were.)