[DoomRavager]

By observation they have managed to determine that Lasers will assign somewhat higher priority to more advanced tech that gets thrown at them compared to less advanced, so they'd prefer to shoot at a TSF than at an armored car, and prefer to shoot at a nuclear missile than to shoot at an artillery shell.

Long distance sniping's too much of a hassle to pull off safely, if you have a line of sight to them they have a line of sight to you and you get a faceful of laser, so they prefer to launch massive artillery bombardment from over the other side of the horizon (hence the horizon acts as cover between the lasers and your battleships and artillery), with a large number of the shells filled with heavy metal dust that explode into big heavy metal clouds upon getting lasered, which helps to reduce laser intensity and allow more shells to get through than they otherwise would have had. Then TSFs close the distance while making use of their high mobility to use the other BETA for cover (since Lasers will never ever shoot at other BETA) while tanks and artillery continue to shell the battlefield, and make the Lasers a priority target in addition to their mission of killing all the BETA they can. In that way it could be said that TSFs bring the air campaign down to the ground, making use of high mobility and speed to kill high priority targets to support other ground units while in turn being supported by said ground units. Ideally, once all the lasers in the area are dead, they can call in airborne bombing runs and chopper support, giving them a decisive advantage in that battle.

The big "capture BETA and figure out what makes them tick" program, Alternative II, ended in failure when they failed to figure out anything substantial about BETA physiology from studying captured specimens, at the cost of many lives in the attempt to capture and contain live specimens for study.

Aside from said heavy metal clouds that help to reduce laser intensity, TSFs are also covered with anti-laser ablative coating that can survive up to around 3 to 5 seconds worth of direct full power Lux laser exposure, and detection of initial laser contact with the coating triggers alarms in the pilot's cockpit warning the pilot to evade out of the beam's path/get to cover immediately, or if the pilot chooses the TSF computer can attempt to auto-evade upon detection. Stops the lasers from being a one-hit instant kill, so to speak, but if said anti-laser coating is burned away completely or was never present, the laser is powerful enough to cause armor to instantly flash to plasma, causing a plasma explosion.

For some reason this vital anti-laser coating wasn't depicted in Episode 2 of the anime, instead lasers caused instadeaths. I wonder why. The ablative coating can't be all that recent an innovation as of 2001.

They also have the gravitational distortion fields created by BETA tech powered Moorcock-Lechte engines that are used in the aforementioned G-bombs that render them untouchable to lasers by bending/distorting them, but also have the somewhat undesirable effect of turning any living thing inside the field to tomato sauce in all their previous attempts to make a vehicle shielded by said fields thanks to incapability to precisely control the shape of the field. Combined with how limited their stockpile of BETA-manufactured G-elements (essentially super science phlebotnium that the humans can't figure out how to replicate) is (it's only found at the very deepest part of BETA Hives, and they only had any at all because they nuked the Canada landing unit then scavenged them from its remains, it's unfeasible to attempt to make use of them to add deflector shields to TSFs.