I'm sure people have tried. The problem with beam weapons in particular is they have an extremely short range so you have to be nearly point blank to have it work. Particle beams and railguns seem to be a bit longer ranged and might work slightly better.
The range of beam weapons is certainly their weak point.
But neither are particle beams, or railguns longer ranged than lasers, not would it matter if they were.
A standard combat missile might have range of 50m km, while the wiki’s 20cm laser proposal has a range of 400k km, and the gaussgun has a range of 30k km. A beam armed ship has to cross 49,600,000 km under fire anway, so the extra 370,000 km wont really matter. Either you are able to sustain the enemy fire completely (thus the range to cross becomes nearly irrelevant), or not (in which case you cant make it anyway).
The only real reason for longer-ranged beam weapons is the range of the enemy’s beam weapons. If the other guy uses 10cm railguns with a range of 40k km, then you want to outrange him, as beam weapons are significantly harder to stop.
Even then there is still two issues to deal with: one is that as you close the range to the enemy ships before they exhaust their magazines the flight time of the missiles gets shorter and shorter which gives you less and less time to have whatever PD method you choose be able to shoot down the enemy missiles. By the time you get into range the flight time might be less than 5 seconds and you might not even have an opportunity to fire PD at all.
Realistically most beam warships use beam PD weapons, which are only really usable in “final fire” mode. The flight time of enemy missiles is not really important for final fire, and final fire will always get a shot, even if the flight time of the enemy is lower than 5s, no?
The only thing is the “tracking bonus”, which in most circumstances is not that important…
the next issue is the beam weapons themselves, optimal solution is to have PD and offensive weapons be on independent fire control and reactors. this would make for some large and expensive ships unless you sacrifice and use some shared systems, but the problem there is you would need to turn off PD while at point blank range to enemies in order to enable your offensive weapons.
Actually that issue is much smaller for beam warships, compared to missile ships. For a missile ship you will usually have main tubes of size 3-6 and PD tubes of size 1, and corresponding firecontrolls with huge differences in resolution and range. The PD systems must be able to engage full broadsides of the enemy, while the ASMs must be able to overcome the enemies PD. So there are two requirements that must be fulfilled, making for expensive ships. (Ok, technically it might be possible to build and all-large-calibre missile ship, which simply relies on superior range or speed to destroy enemy ships before they can launch their missiles).
For beam warships the same thing does not apply that much. Given that beam ships can withstand enemy missile fire reliably anyway (else they would not have made it into range in the first place), it does not matter how long they take to kill an enemy ship, it only matters that they don’t get into range of their beams. So a single large laser would be sufficient to –slowly – pick apart an enemy. The laser can not be intercepted, so there is no minimum number of lasers that is needed to overcome enemy PDs as with missiles. So in the end the double-requirement tends to play much more in favour of beam warships. And that is not even counting that offensive lasers are also able to serve in a PD role.
A caveat: the damage per second dealt by offensive lasers
can matter if the enemy packs long range beams himself, and if he carries significant shields. If the shields reload faster than you main laser deals damage, then that is a bit arkward…