Buck Rogers laser guns - we have arrived!
This is hard stuff - VERY hard stuff to do even as science fiction stories for years have made it seem simple (that genre of books was almost the ONLY thing that I read growing up - after I "ran the table" at the library on books on WW II.
Boeing's project for the Air Force seemingly done good:

Boeing has successfully tested their new Matrix laser over airborne targets, which is a world's first. In total, they shot down five drones at various ranges. That's a lot of pew pew in a day.
The Air Force and Boeing achieved a directed-energy breakthrough with these tests. MATRIX—Mobile Active Targeting Resource for Integrated eXperiments—performance is especially noteworthy because it demonstrated unprecedented, ultra-precise and lethal acquisition, pointing and tracking at long ranges using relatively low laser power.
Sorry for the "lite" kind of posting tonight - had a meeting tonite, taking time away from posting.



