This might be a real rookie question and I think I know the answer but for clarification I thought I’d come to you lot 
I’m going to have a “charging” particle system on a cannon, this will be a GPU Sprite emitter pumping out glowing balls which get balled to the center and vanish (energy being compacted) and as this happens a big glowing ball will appear in the middle. I want this ball to grow slowly over a couple of seconds but i’m pretty sure that a particle system (ps from here on out) can only ever be 1 second long ( I think ).
So as the player holds x button the PS will play but I want the charge to visually represent how long you have to wait this will be a couple of seconds. So because of this unless someone can help me make the PS longer I was going to make multiple PS to represent multiple sections of the charge, and I was wondering is it more efficent to attach the particle systems to the actor before hand and activate them or spawn them in when and as needed.
Thanks and sorry for the long post