keeping particles as children of the emmiter?

[Yokom]

This is my problem im emmiting particles off fast moivng objects. I have the emmiter as a child of the control node for the ship. When the ship gains speed the emitted particles stream off behind the ship when I want them to flare in front of the ship, this case is a muzzle flash for the ships guns.

I made a attempt at adding the ships speed to the velocity of the particles but that only kinda works as long as you dont rotate the ship where you are drifting in a different vector then you are "pointing" so to speak.

My Question that im attempting to answer today is how do I make the particles emit as children of the ship so that they have velocity and direction in somthing like a local refrence to the parent object of the emitter.

Or am I going about this completely wrong in using particles for this application and should I be using an animated mesh or animated billboard to create the effect im looking for.

//note When I say fast moving objects Im talking in the range of 50-400 ogre units/sec. I think that will be the speed of our ships in the scale we have right now.