A guy with the nick innocent.civilian who used to patronize the NS:CO forums explained how it worked -- unfortunately those forums crashed and were lost, and he seems to have gone missing as well; probably working on some project of his own.
I'm only working from memory, he proposed 'shaping' all explosion effects, fixing their orientation, suggested using something like 'traction code' or collision detection to make it all work and look good. No idear if that will point you in any useful direction (not a programmer, just script) -- but he made is 'sound' easy.
I'll see if I can track him down...
.