You've missed the actual body itself
Bullets and explosions are existing objects in the game engine who are using simple planes. I'd suggest looking for a bod/bob named "11994" or better "SBTYPE_2D". You never know
but the entry points at SBTYPE_2D. That's probably an ID, not a flag. In that file the actual planes are defined, which side the plane is facing with its texture. In bullets it's often times that they use 8 instead of 4 planes, to enhance the visible color in terms of saturation, by having them rotated 180°. The upside is that you get a highly saturated image on screen, the downside is that you display a lot more polys than needed. /edit: You need to do this in a proper way.... the bodies are often in use for other things. Probably also for smaller explosions, so copy your body file (not the txt, the bob/bod file) and rename it, then point your new entry you made yourself to that.
Otherwise you'll get weird results and you need to go through the whole bob/bod tranfers again.
The entry you posted is defining the actual body first, the following numbers are length, rotation, shrink and grow definition and some other flags. The numbers from 10653 are actually dds files used on the bod/bob planes which are displayed and removed in the order given in that entry. Afaik they're somewhere very deep in the cat/dats "v" folder, but i did that 7 years ago and i may not remember correctly where they are... search for 10*.dds if you have unpacked the cat/dats.
Try to use an older version of the X3 Editor if you can get your hands on that and work with a effects.txt from X3:Reunion. This is a lot more understandable, as the X3 Editor UI is explaining a lot of the entries you can see here as sheer numbers. If you look just at the effects.txt your only hope will be that someone from the darkages of X Series is still alive and working in the Ego dev team. If he does have a lot of time and patience he may be able to shed some light on the queue of numbers, their meaning and the time/length scale which is in use. Even the old X3 Editor isn't able to pin down any effect, but at least it's better to understand. AP is a lot worse, because there are mixed entries and new animations from several people using the effects.txt in a different way. So Albion Prelude is not really good to dig something out.
You shouldn't temper the animation.txt, as these entries are called by a lot of different things and just define the deformation, but not the source of the animation itself. You can see that as these are x;y;z pairs of coords, not IDs nor time lengths or rotations.
As far as the engine goes, you'll find pairs of three if they're coords. As soon as you get into movement entries, there are rotation modifiers added (xyz for coords and abc for rotation->yaw, pitch, roll). That's most common in the universe map, if the models of asteroids/fabs are located in the sector entry. So you can define by just looking at the numbers what it'd be. Every other entry is most commonly an ID type or something defining a length.
So to change your explosion, your best bet is to stick with the effects and body txt files. Replace the files 10653 to 10670 with something very easy to recognise, like a red square. Never use spheres or circles
You won't recognise any rotation. Have a look at the bod/bob file, the X3 Editor can transfer bob to bods and vice versa, so can load them into GMax or something similar. Most important, don't try to figure out which entry doea what in effects, use the X3 Editor. Otherwise it gets really frustrating to figure out which number does what. It takes literally days to dig through this, and most of the old modders who could help are long gone
