Thanks for the feedback.
The engines look weird (and are, in some cases, dissapearing), due to the fact that the Armada engine wasn't designed to handle that many sprite emitters of the same "name" at the same time. I'm working on both an interim solution and a long-term solution to this issue:
Interim: Converting all the Sprite emitters into Lights. No more engine trails, but at least there will be engine glows...
Long-term: I've e-mailed the Armada 2 developers at Mad Doc Software, Inc. about releasing the sourcecode. I fowarded them to this site to see what a community is like when they have the sourcecode for their game to play with!

So, we'll see what happens. I'm testing the light engines tonight.