I used my particle system with decreasing alpha.
You could recreate it by adding data (list or dict) to a list of particles containing the image, alpha and position of the player. each frame you can iterate through the list, fill the image with the alpha and draw it at the position, then decrease the alpha. once the alpha == 0, you can remove it from the list.
that's for the ships. if you want to do motion blur just fill the screen that you're blitting onto the window with 150 alpha, then you can partially see the last frame assuming you didn't fill the window.