I would have actually had the laser musket be a marksmans weapon, based on tech being developed pre-war as an experimental variant that never went into mass deployment. Bunch of them made, possibly due to a corrupt military official, but never approved for actual field use. After the bombs fell, and things had a while to go bad, the remnants of the military and engineers who were scraping by like everyone else distributed the laser muskets to the other survivors, because there's no point in letting serviceable weapons rot in a lab somewhere.

Due to their slow rate of fire they were best given to people who served as hunters and sentries, those with good aim and steady heads. Over time they started to wear out, and lacking the infrastructure to repair them properly, the survivors instead improvised and managed to create the sub-par but functional laser musket seen in FO4. Thus, the laser musket became a staple weapon of the post-war inhabitants of Boston and eventually became the favoured weapon of the Minutemen for that very reason.

Add some meat to the rather bare bones in universe reasoning to the presence of the laser musket.


Have a somewhat senile ghoul engineer from pre-war who was involved in the project, and in figuring out how to keep them running with substandard materials who can pass along patchy bits of information about the process things took. Perhaps a quest to get a near fully functional musket from pre-war as a badge of legitimacy for the player as the new leader of the Minutemen, with it essentially serving a similar mechanical niche to the anti-material rifle or gauss rifle.


Hell, you could even have someone explain why the Minutemen dress like a bunch of cosplayers, responding to the player commenting on their appearance with something like 'If you want to trudge through miles of freezing mud in that radioactive wasteland in a sweater and a pair of loafers feel free. Me? I'll keep my longcoat and boots'