Any ideas for having a line renderer (or similar) generate specular reflections?

In my game, I have something like a "laser" beam, which I've implemented as a LineRenderer. The tricky thing about these beams is that their path can bend due to strong gravitational forces acting on them:



On unfortunately thing, visually, is that the beam doesn't produce any specular reflections, the way the light sources in the scene do. (For example, you can see the purple light source below the "Rift" in this scene.)

I was looking into ways I might add specular reflections, but so far they don't see viable.

The first approach I took was to use Tube-shaped Area lights. That actually works really well for perfectly straight beams. But, due to the curve of the Line Renderers, I need to place on Tube light per segment of the line renderer. This is expensive, and quickly caps out the number of active lights.

I've considered having the Line Renderer instead be a mesh with strong emission, but I don't think emission affects specular, just diffuse, so that wouldn't work anyway.

And another option would be to use planar reflections, but I think that concept is way over budget for the kind of performance I'm looking for.

Is there some other way to produce specular reflections from a line renderer? Or simply specular reflections from a mesh, similar to what a light produces, but following an arbitrary mesh?