This paper investigates the extension of optical fibre beam delivery to high-brightness applications, in particular laser percussion drilling, where both a good beam quality and high peak power are required. Beam quality preservation through a number of optical fibres is studied both experimentally and by using a ray propagation model. It is determined that in order to achieve the beam quality required for percussion drilling ( M 2 2 laser-annealing technique is shown to increase the damage threshold by a factor of 10, allowing 28 J, 1 ms pulses to be transmitted.