Scattering surfaces aren't going to be any better against lasers, they'll heat up and become black bodies relatively quickly. Neither will emitting smoke or fog

Scattering surfaces aren't going to be any better against lasers, they'll heat up and become black bodies relatively quickly. Neither will emitting smoke or fog, because we're talking about airborne items, and they won't stay surrounding the aircraft very well. Sacrificial or heat shields will help, but that's extra weight that reduces your payload, and for quadcopter type drones, you can't reasonably add those to your props. SDI wasn't successful, no, because they didn't have the capability to make high power electrical lasers worth a damn back then. But the semi-operational AN/SEQ-1 was 30kW a decade ago, and technology has improved since then. Again, we're looking at an order of magnitude more power. And I don't think we need many more orders of magnitude to get down below the threshold of : can't do anything in the time you've got.