Yeah I found the .eff files and attempted to change a few values but it seemed to cause instability when i altered some values to see if I could change how the smoke looked.
When I say instability it seemed (could be unrelated of course) that as i increased say DistMinMax values it seemed to cause my sound to be knocked out, maybe due to particle limit?

But anyhow there seem to be 2 main smoke files that control aircraft smokes (this is a guess) these are labled as generic (Generic_0 & Generic_2) the other two are labled as Chimney and Locomotive.

File Generic_0 has twice as many options as Generic_2, 2 contains no life values or colour etc, this maybe of course that it uses the values from Generic_0.
Anyhow do you think that particle limit could knock out the sound?
I found that sounds with more than a 2-3 second track length cause sound drops and so there must be limit to sample length and sample amount, at the moment the game probably only has 2 sample sounds for all explosions, all engines use merlin prs, all twins then use twin left and right prs. There is 1 sound for every GUI type option and ingame functions such a switches and canopies open/close, levers, pumps etc basically the works, that shocked my beyond belief. I have never seen a game so sparce in content in this way before. Stock IL2 had probably double the sounds.

If i could find a way to add and define samples to the prs files I could create a full and I mean full sound set, but I wouldnt even know where to begin on that one