Quote Originally Posted by hemmjo View Post
If you" blind and fry sensitive optical sensors aboard a hostile spacecraft" would not not make the weapon lethal?

Seems to me a space craft does not have many "sensitive optical sensors aboard" that are not critical to survival? Maybe a few cameras, etc.
Early CCD sensors were quite susceptible to IR damage (and still are...want a quick IR camera? Disassemble a cheap webcam and remove the IR filter. Often you don't have to even do that..point an IR remote control at a web cam and you can clearly see the IR LED light up when you press a button.) the output of these lasers was likely in the milliwatt range. But this was a project born of late Soviet-era institutional paranoia as much as anything else; it really didn't have a realistic use case.