Recycling gun

Hey, I was making a cannon, and what I want to happen is for the gun to recoil and to use a particle emitter for the gun, how would I go about recycling the particle emission?

I’ve wondered about how to do that for a long time. If you want to use particles, the only way I can see of doing it is to have tons of objects with different start and end times.

You could just do a separate render of the muzzle flash and use that as an animated texture.