After reading through the impracticality of most energy weapons I have abandoned the idea of having energy weapons be the norm. Even though my story takes place very far in the future(thousands of years), I still don't think energy weapons would be the best option. Especially for a sidearm.

Some of the highlights from Projecthro:

1. Any laser gun powerful enough to shoot a hole in somebody can probably instantly blind you if it hits your eyes. Even if it just reflected off something shiny. It is a danger to anybody nearby, with "nearby" defined as "closer than the horizon."
2. It takes lots of tricky engineering to make a laser bolt do more damage than your average bullet. And to be more efficient than your average bullet
3. Shooting a continual laser beam at somebody is like spitting into the wind. Vaporizing metal or flesh from the target will mess up the beam. Instead the beam should be a series of short pulses.
4. Lasers need large batteries because they are power hogs
5. A "heat-ray" is a continuous beam laser. It is like a flame-thrower. Made of energy beams
6. A "blaser" is a pulsed beam laser. It is like a bullet. Made of energy beams
7. A laser aimsight can be the actual weapon optics, much like an SLR reflex camera eyepiece. This makes the aimsight vastly more accurate than iron sights
8. If you are having a raygun fight in an atmosphere, you want the laser gun to use some color of visible light or near-infrared frequencies
9. Particle-beam weapons are far more efficient at doing damage to the target compared to lasers
10. Particle-beam weapons can give serious doses of deadly radiation to the gunslinger, due to radiation backscatter
11. Plasma weapons do not work

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Do you guys have any designs that are particularly realistic? What uses do they have? What drawbacks?