I think there's an interesting idea here, but there's an issue I think is detrimental to the game's balance. The idea of making the laser a damageable area incentivizes the player to keep the distance between the two ships as short as possible. Since there's no incentive to keep the ships further apart, it means the best strategy is to keep the ships together, turning it into a more basic dodging game with a more problematic movement system. I think adding some sort of incentive to keep the ships at a distance from each other would help make the game a lot more interesting.