FYI, I did as I said and fixed up the COOLEXPLOSION1 animation with one of my own, and that's worked perfectly. As an interesting side note on that, it turned out that a COOLEXPLOSION1 shooter shots will only travel for as long as the animation plays a single loop. It just so happened that this specific distance was pretty much exactly what I needed anyway, so everything worked out great.
With the shooters modified, the framerate is happily sitting up around 150-170 without issue even on my average little work PC... It opens up a whole lot of options for adding more detail to the scene
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