Uh...heh...well, 5.6 although not exactly new or complicated, still was my mainstay for a few years
Rock on man!
And it still blows TS away
(Podfighter was done in 5.6)
But uh...I would definatly suggest upgrading to 6.5
But a weapons effect in 5.6? Hmm...I am trying to remember that far back...weapon weapon weapon...there are several things I can suggest.
1: Toss a null object, parent it to your fighter. move the null to where you want the gunfire to come from. Then parent a light to it. if this is just for a still, make the light intensity like 150%, qwith a limited range, like maybe half of your fighters length. Go into properties, turn on lense flare, make the streaks really long, and really random, with an anamorphic distort, and no reflections. Set the sharpenss way down, it will look a lit like a gunburst, after you tweak it and play with it.
2: Get 6.5 and I can teach you how to do photorealistic gunfire effects, plasma discharges, recractive heat displacements, and all kinds of great things that put most sci fi effects to shame, (And take years to render)
3: if this is for an animation, do the same as above, turn down the lense flare settngs quite a bit though, make an elongated sphere in modeler, drop it into layout, parent it to the null, set up 2 keyframes, 1 while inside the barrel of the gun, (or hull of the ship) and another while way out in front of th ship, how far and how many keyframes will determine the speed of the gunfire. shrink the sphere way down, so that it looks liek a 250mm shell or something, set up it's surface for glow effects, and a niec luminosity texture, as well as some fractal noise, to make it really look energetic, turn glow on in the image processing menu. Select your object again, go to graph editor, and set it on repeat, not it will fire over and over again
It will glow, you should also turn motion blur on, then it will streak nicely
On a side note, if you have lw6 or 6.5 do not try these methods. THey will work. But there are much better and much nicer effects you can do in 6 and 6.5 with less work.
Incedentally you can do some really nice things in LW 5.6 but I am not sure what plugins are being used in this situation, or waht are available, so I can't really get into the nice higher end stuff.
Get 6.5 I will teach you how sto set up a random fire pattern with realistic gunfire, and trails, and ten times faster then it takes to do all that in 5.6
Rob
