Edit just realized this belongs in another forum
setting up the laser ‘objects’ on another render layer and then using that with alpha (make sure ‘film/transparent’ is ON in camera settings. Then applying a glow and Lens Distortion node with only dispersion having a number - set this to something like 0.6 could be quite cool. You could also mess around with only defining this by certain colour channels using the split to RGBA node.
I should have mentioned. I’m using Blender Internal. I’d like to use Cycles because that seems to be the way things are going, but Cycles renders are way too noisy for me and it takes too much fiddling around to get even half decent results while Blender Internal gives me results I like out of the box.
I think the nodes I mentioned exist in Internal Compositor - actually they definitely do cos I used them recently on a file which was definitely BI and used Freestyle also.
yeah they definitely do- btw i meant ‘Glare’ not ‘glow’ in my description
OK, I tried it, I don’t think I explained myself very well (or I just didn’t understand your suggestion).
I have an object with high reflectivity. Right next to it, I want to have a laser beam. I’d like the laser beam to reflect in the object, but not cast a shadow on it. The only way I’ve found to turn off casting a shadow also turns off the reflection.
Attachments
Laser.blend (505 KB)
oh ok haha I just went straight to make lasers setting - I’ll have a look at that later tonight hopefully - I’m going to Pacific Rim for the second time soon 
Does the “cylinder” object have to receive other shadows? If not you could turn off Receive in the cylinder material’s Shadow panel. You could also look into setting the lamps to light only the Cylinder layer (“This layer only” option), and having the laser beam on another layer. These are some other nice reasons to use BI; Cycles doesn’t have such options yet.
That did it, thanks.
You are welcome. What worked for you?
Moving the laser object to another layer worked.