Yes, including another light source in the scene is how you get the reflections of the engine glow onto the wings and other parts of the craft. I guess in theory you could do that in the completed scene, but because of time I rendered just the crafts that way (deleted planet1) and then composited to two pics (the trick is to position the emitters correctly, which is kind of hard since you don't see the actual craft objects in the preview). For this scene I used two light blue spheres (size:0.7, emitting power 1000). The lense flare in post-prod just adds this sort of "combustion" feel.
I agree that the motion blur is a bit subtle. It's partly because it was added to another isolated render of the fighters (no emitters, no planet, just a sun) and then composited back into the scene as a separate layer and using a "lighten" blending option in photoshop. A better, but much more time-consuming option, would have been to render the crafts against an alpha channel to get full transparency and composite them onto the full landscape using a "normal" blending mode for the two layers and playing with opacity until it looks right. I couldn't be bothered to cut out the crafts manually though, so I went for "lighten", which basically gets rid of the black background in the isolated render and only copies the lighter parts of the pictures into the landscape image, hence the subtlety...
King_Tiger: Where can I see your Star Trek shuttle?
