Change in Repulsor Technology

[Iron Guy]

I think it's threads like this & the real life armor one that explains why when Bob Layton went to Valiant comics & created X-O Manowar that he made the armor of alien origin. That way he didn't have to explain to a bunch of tech heads how it was supposed to work. No earthly technology = no way to explain it!

[Mario Di Giacomo]

Actually, the leafblower idea has some merit.  I was reading an article on non-lethal weapons a while ago, and one particularly interesting one was called a "vortex cannon", which was essentially a scaled up version of those compressed air ring projectors they sell as toys.  Here's a relevant quote from the article:

Toward the end of World War II, the Germans were reported to have made a different type of acoustic device. It looked like a large cannon and sent out a sonic boomlike shock wave that in theory could have felled a B-17 bomber. In the mid-1940s, the U.S. Navy created a program called Project Squid to study the German vortex technology. The results are unknown. But Guy Obolensky, an American inventor, says he replicated the Nazi device in his laboratory in 1949. Against hard objects the effect was astounding, he says: It could snap a board like a twig. Against soft targets like people, it had a different effect. "I felt like I had been hit by a thick rubber blanket," says Obolensky, who once stood in its path. The idea seemed to founder for years until recently, when the military was intrigued by its nonlethal possibilities. The Army and Navy now have vortex projects underway. The SARA lab has tested its prototype device at Camp Pendleton, one source says.

[Iron Kaiser]

A Sonic Weapon!  Great find Mario!

[Mario Di Giacomo]

A Sonic Weapon!  Great find Mario!

Thanks.  I especially like the way it's actually non-lethal against soft targets....

[Madgyver]

Sadly the source you quoted has 2 different experiments mixed up 

During WWII there were at least 2 efforts in creating a "shock wave weapon" one uses a Vortex (an air ring, which are identical in principal to smoke rings some smokers can achieve to blow). Another Project used a spherical shaped reflector to redirect the shock wave of explosives to a single point.
The first project simply didn't had enough kick to be used as a weapon and the second was very expensive to make and didn't work at large distances (large being 20m away).

Here is a picture of me btw holding a rather large Vortex Cannon on my shoulder this one is not stron enough to effectivly stop a person, but it creates big havocs among loose piles of paper (like in some offices...)

The rings travel very slowly though, depending on how fast you can beat it, still it is significantly slower then speed of sound. Still a very nice toy. You can transfer gases with it over some distance though. 

[kokushishin]

You pretty much something around the size/power of a jet engine to throw around cars then.

[Iron Guy]

I still think that Marvel should just say that Tony's repulsors fire Stark particles to get around this scientific conundrum. After all, if Hank Pym can have his "Pym Particles", then why not?