I "Tivo'ed" it for tonight, and will watch the first half while the second is recording.
I flipped over for about 5 minutes at various points for just a peek and did see the pistol sidearms as well.
The prop guns looked like they were double barreled, perhaps almost trying to imply two different kinds of energy, or shells could be expended.
Although the absence of a visible beam does not mean they're projectile weapons. In clear air you wouldn's see the beam any more than you would the beam of a laser pointer or LAM on a current gun now. (They tried to imply this effect with the "BBQ lighter" guns in Logan's Run. As a kid, I thought it was because they were too cheap to add "lasers" but now realize the effect is more sophisticated and "real".)
And that's only assuming the energy is in a visible wavelength. If it's an X-ray, UV, IR, mircowave "blaster" you won't see anything of the beam itself. Perhaps you'd see a faint aurora-like contrail at night, or in a dark room, of superheated or ionized air left in the wake of the beam.
Actually the "machine war" scenes in Terminator witth the plasma rifles had it kind of right for what portable energy weapon effects might look like at night. A dull "snap" as the beam superheats a column of air in a mini-thunderbolt, and a violet-pinkish glow of air heated to a plasma. Also, while very fast, the beams looked mostly continous, as opposed to a Star Wars'esque "bolt" that's 2-3 feet long flying through the air...
What I really liked of Battlestar Galactica was the somewhat Newtonian physics of the fighters. You could see reaction thrusters, and they only did Star Wars loop-de-loop manuvers part of the time, and coasted spun, and braked like real space, the other part. A lot of it looked like the best scenes in space from Babalon 5 and Firefly in that regard.
The nuke fired at the Galactica actully looked somewhat like space detonations we tested in the 50's, a silent (at least for a bit), big purple white light, instead of a cheesey ball of SFX propane lit on fire. And I also liked the long distance shots of spaceships that were completely silent, kind of like Apollo 13 or 2001: A Space Oddesy. They couldn't keep it up the entire time for dramatic reasons, but it's at least a hint of the vaccuum of space.
The space battle cinematography is also excellent, sort of "Saving Private Ryan" hand-held camera and jerky looking, with great long shots giving excellent perspective size differences between fighters and the Galactica, and the relative speeds.
It's still not even close as to what space is really like, but for TV space opera, it's pretty good.
idiots. 
