Hi has anyone used these or similar to simulate lasers on your ships and how good are they? Is the light beam itself observable like those strong beams?

https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Compact-size-green-dot-520nm-5mw_60699873768.html?s=p

I am looking to mount these on ships(5mm is about the size of the QTCs on the ISD model) and to control/program the blinking which a friend tells me has to be done via a circuitboard/IC chip/Arduino/etc. Anyone have experience/tutorial with these? Much appreciated

For the beams to be visible you need either lots of particles that scatter the beam (like dust, smoke or water vapour) or a laser of a specific wavelength/strength that can scatter from the molecules within the air. Blue is more visible than red for example. I doubt a 3$ alibaba laser beam will be visible in normal conditions, and if it is it will probably be barely detectable. You will not get a beam like this without a fog machine or something similar:

Not sure why you'd even want them on Armada ships though as starwars 'lasers' mostly shoot in pulses rather than beams. Plus there is the safety risk of the lasers hitting your opponent's eyes whenever you move your ships.

With laser pointers, the effect that you could hypothetically achieve (and it would certainly require soldering skills to set it up) would be to sprinkle little laser dots on the board in front of your firing arc. If you could blink out a volley to randomly paint dots onto the ground in front of you, it might look cool. But nothing would ever look like lasers/blasters do in Star Wars, because Star Wars uses impossible nonsensonium in all of its weapons. Pew pew pew!