While the weapon deals kinetic damage, it is explicitly described as being made of energy. Since incorporeal creatures are subject to energy damage, albeit taking half, I would likewise allow a solarian's solar weapon to deal half damage to an incorporeal target instead of being negated.
What about once you've activated plasma sheath? Then you are doing only fire damage but it still targets KAC.
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I see it as the weapon hits Kinetic Armor Class. That means the weapon has to touch the target. If the weapon can't touch the target, it can't deal energy damage to it.
Well even with EAC, which is used to see for instance if your armor dissipates a touch or ray spell, you still have to touch the target. AC in Starfinder and every other D&D derivative is an abstraction of both "hitting" and "getting past the armor's mitigation," since it isn't like more complex RPGs which break armor down into separate numbers for deflecting the attack so it misses entirely vs absorbing damage from an attack that does connect. You would logically be at least "touching" the target with any roll that beats an AC of 10 + the target's Dex mod up to the armor's max Dex, with everything above that being armor mitigation.
In the end, it's not worth doing a complicated subsystem for touch spells, incorporeal or whatever. I like how Starfinder does it. And as pointed out above, and in many other cases in the book, there are weapons which deal energy damage but still target KAC. So again, I wouldn't worry about it too much.
I'm going to stick to recommending that a weapon made out of energy, like the Solarian's solar weapon, can hit an incorporeal target for half damage if you beat their AC, even if the AC being targeted is KAC. That's how I'm going to rule in the game I'm running when it eventually comes up.