Cold Atomic Space War(Seaman Edition WIP)

This is a work in progress which I am posting here since I need help and do not want to spam greenfoot discuss with my trivial questions just yet. I am a absolute beginner, and will appreciate all the help you guys can give.

As can be clearly seen, this is a mod of MiksAsteroids by Michael Kollinger, all proper respects to him.

I have remapped the controls.
W thrusts the ship forward.
q and e rotates in the respective directions.
a and d allow sideways thrusting. a thrusts towards the right as it fires the left side thrusters, so it makes the ship go port and vice versa.

You would notice that the spaceship leaves an ugly trail of red buttons behind it when forward thrusting. This is supposed to represent super hot plasma emmitted by the rocket.

I am trying to make it just a red line, sort of like the trail in the scenario Uncle Worm, but I am failing badly, as I cannot seem to make anything appear.
Your ship is supposed to explode when you touch this red hot plasma, but for the moment that feature is commented out.
Why? Because when the ship instance drops the hot gas, it immediately touches it and explodes.
Now any bright ideas to implement this trail of hot gas (they dissipate eventually) properly? I am still at that stage where I mod stuff, so a few pointers to relevant scenarios also work.

Thanks very much.