Are you using Max? The "stretch" for warp effect is simple: just animate a non-uniform scale into the movement of the ships.
The way I got the video below (I kept it slow so you could see easily) is I simply placed a plane behind the very end of the nacelle and then animated at each frame from 1-10, 1-5 being the stretch out and 6-10 being the stretch back to normal. At each frame, I would go to the top view and zoom in on the spot where the nacelle should touch the plane I made. Then scale up until the nacelle edge is touching it again and move to the next frame. Repeat. You can do this for every frame, every other frame or every 10 frames: the principle is the same. The animation for the scale back to normal is the exact reverse of the scale-up. Just copy and paste numbers from the earlier keyframes in reverse order. Make sure you remove the plane after you're done with it!
Now it's your turn to teach me something: how do you get those flashes?
