So, when looking up Beamlet on Google, I found out about the Z-Machine and it's brothers located in New Mexico at the Sandia National Laboratories. Â These are massive multi-Kiliwatt Lasers/Mazers. Â Used for weapons research and available for scientists to test out their theories on energy in the terrawatt scale. Â They're used to create enviroments and conditions that normally could not exist on earth. Â They are able to split and combine atoms, create plasma (like in the center of the sun), and other conditions (focussed microwaves and radiations that would otherwise be impossible). Â They are instrumental in atomic weapons research (why there were built initially) to test what would happen should one go off in controlled experiments.
Some of the pictures on Google Image Search look very-much like the into cinematics:
https://www.google.ca/search?q=z-machine&tbm=isch - Those performance robots are really cool looking too!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z_Pulsed_Power_Facility
http://www.sandia.gov/z-machine/
I spent a bit of time reading stuff about the devices and it's incredible. Â It made a lot of buzz when it was featured in Wired Magazine slightly before this game was first being created. Â It's likely at the very least a source of inspiration, and probably the facility that the accident Trace had happened.