the issue is the explosions don't come out at well at all.. its the way the engine works with particles. This is why I re-directed this post to the new thread with explosion textures that will work, you will need to still come up with your own by using various combinations. All you have to do is find the texture you want and rename it to the existing texture. I'm very surprised that no one hasn't figured out how to do this yet, and its right in front of them.
for instance if you look in data\shapes\weapons\plasma\particles and you replace the plas_smoke, plas_cloud, plas_flash, and plas_blast with r_glow, r_blast2, part_flamer2 from the particle pack, you will find that the plasma explosion becomes a firey plasma explosion.