What we really need is an energetically advantageous way to produce high energy neutral particle beams. That would start to look more like the ray guns of science fiction than lasers ever will. It’s not just the weather either, when you hit a target that has a bit of appropriate ablative armor, you’ll be dealing with another source of bloom.

LIPC tech is good too, and might be closer than you’d think. You can exploit the interaction of ultrashort laser pulses to create and modulate plasma, and then do neat things like send a bunch of volts down the channel.