I think that's still a power and cooling issue. I only have a very basic understanding of physics so correct me if I'm wrong, but the thing with energy weapons is that energy is lost rapidly as you go further away from the source. What was it called? Inverse exponential square something decline? I dunno.
While a laser will lose energy over extreme distances, that's more due to diffusion from air particles/dust. The Inverse Square law applies to things like radar or a flashlight beam that propagate outwards in an expanding cone, but doesn't really apply to things like a laser, as the light in a laser is running parallel and doesn't spread out but maintains intensity over its full range (I am simplifying this a bit, obviously).
It's similar in concept to how guns work, actually, with the expanding gases from the gun powder trapped in a straight barrel and thus applying full force to the bullet down the entire length of the barrel. Burn the powder in the open air and it just makes a puff of gas that stops expanding within a few inches.
I remember seeing those from documentaries as early as the mid 2000s. The laser requires a full on jumbo jet to house the power requirements and everything else needed, but I didn't know the range was only a disappointing six miles. IIRC, an ICBM covers that in ONE SECOND.
Well, the military immediately started working on a new airborne laser meant for a UAV, which would have a range closer to 60 miles, in 2015 or so. Supposedly it was going to be ready for test firing by 2021, but I'm not sure there's been any updates on the project since it began. It would be a solid-state laser, not a chemical laser, though I'm not sure why the change. Perhaps they thought it could have some weight savings.
Also, the airborne laser I was talking about was for tactical ballistic missiles, not ICBMs. They wanted a weapon that could shoot down HIMARS type missiles while they were in the boost phase over the enemy.
It's only now as an adult that I realized those documentaries from 20 years ago were probably propaganda.
While it's possible the weapons were all propaganda, the sheer expansion of technology in the last thirty or so years makes me think if anything they were underselling their real capabilities at the time. I remember reading hundreds of articles about future stealth fighter variants in the works in the early 2000's in Popular Science and other magazines, and virtually nothing about drones like the Predator, Reaper, or that weird stealth Sentinel drone the Iranians hijacked back in 2011, and with hindsight we now know what direction warfare was really headed. I think a lot of energy is expended to slow-drip new technologies to people, while tech development is actually much farther ahead and only gets revealed when something goes wrong, like a drone crashing and being publicly filmed by a hostile power. That probably explains like 99% of UFOs, actually.
