It’s similar to regular bullets, just lots of them strung together and locked to the x-axis of the player to stop it ‘bending’ when the player moves. Each section has lots of random electric arc type particles and a blue glow underneath.
I originally made the laser as one piece and scaled it from the player ship end when it collided with something but the particles don’t scale in that way so I switched to the above method instead. It works well enough for this application but would not allow for firing diagonally for instance.