Don't think of the crash as the fighter planting its nose into the ground like a lawn dart. Instead, the pilot might have been able to level off and flare the fighter's nose at the last moment and drop their gear, bringing the fighter to an unplanned and extremely rough, but mostly controlled, landing, where the landing gear thankfully didn't buckle, but the jarring landing knocked the emitters for two of the lasers out of alignment, or perhaps their emitter ports were struck by foreign object damage (FOD) at the unprepared impromptu landing site, such as rocks that got thrown up in the air by the violence of the fighter's passing.