David Hambling

Easy defence: have the defnding ship coated witrha thick layer of material which ablates when struck by high-energy laser. This absorbs some of the energy,more importantly the repulsion effect generated by the jet of ablated material moved the ship out of the beam. Also, that energy is quite low for such a large spot size, it's not going to do that much damage.

If you can liquefy them and bring them back, can you dehydrate the liquid and rehydrate afterwards? That will save you about 70%. I call this "ye method of essential saltes" (palingenesis)