Can I give an actor an emitter (a mermanent emitter that keeps going as soon as it's spawned), and if so, can someone link me/post an example of this (in code form).

Like attached to the actor? Yeah, easily.
Somewhere in the actor definition:

Replace *EMITTER* with your emitter, *X* with the X offset of where you want it to be (+X is right), and *Y* with the Y offset of where you want it to be (+Y is down).

By the way it's not going to turn around when the actor turns around, so I hope you're wanting to aim that either up, down, or radially.

Of course you can also use Lua to update the hflipped status.

And change whether it's emitting.

But if you were to link the emitter to the actor by a Position lock, then the
emitter couldn't damage the actor or push the actor in the normal ways.

And, I'm fairly sure you can't access an emitter attached to an actor, and emitters
attached to actors can't have Lua scripts running on them.