The vault wiki states that the Archimedes laser does about 12,000 damage

Now how does a Securitron Mk2, or an NCR ranger take a direct impact on Very Hard?

By all rights, they should be scattered and splattered.

I find nothing to substantiate your claim of 12,000 damage either http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/ARCHIMEDES_II or http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Euclid%27s_C-Finder

http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Fallout:_New_Vegas_weapons

Check Here, under the respective entry

Would your skill in Energy Weapons affect the damage output?

I dont think so, it appears that the laser is fired from a 'Weapon in the Sky' by game mechanics, like the Satcom Launcher in FO:3

Any-Who, even if it was, how could it so dramatically effect the damage

Pretty sure most of the damage is done by the Archimedes explosions in GECK. There are (2) entries under explosions:

ARCHIMEDESIExplosion - 200 damage 128 radius (very narrow and focused)

ARCHIMEDESIIExplosion - 350 damage 1024 radius (with a force of 10,000 for Havok to toss stuff around)

Given the effects that I see in various videos, it's the 2nd explosion that gets used for the effect.

Have you tried using it much? I find plenty of foes survived the blast so in future games I decided to using the array as a power source and get the extra skill book.

To give you some ideas, the player is generally considered to be 128 units tall (128u). A blast radius of 1024 means something around 16 meters/yards, which is fairly large. However, explosives damage tails off sharply as you get farther from the center. Not sure if it's linear or a curved fall-off. Plus you have the explosives skill that comes into play along with the various perks (Demolition Expert and the one that increases blast radius).

And sometimes, there's a very small rock that shields the NPC from the blast. Very few explosions ignore line-of-sight, so most of them suffer from the issues of the explosion going off inside a model or around the corner.

Which is why, in my DENV mod, I sometimes make the really big booms ignore line-of-sight so that you get a more even chance of doing damage. If terrain were destructible, that small rock would vaporize/vanish and wouldn't be able to shield NPCs from the blast.

lol awesome idea