Thanks for the tips. It looks like nested objects are the way to go. Here's my attempts as of last night. The animation is 6 sec.long [at 24 fps]. The first eight pics shown here happen in the first 18 frames. Then there's a long [comparatively] cooling off period while everything falls to the ground. I'm using [basically] the 'EXPLODE' modifier. There's some FOG and FIRE in there as an experiment toward the end. The explosion uses four nested spheres. The first, which you see in Pic.#1, shatters into tiny pieces, then a second that breaks into largeish pieces, and a third to which I applied the 'STRANGE' shader, plus a hefty dollop of 'GLOW' and 'TRANSPARENCY' Then there's a fourth [a vertex obj.] with the same texture map as the outside one. This one I took into the Vertex Modeler and punched out a few polygons, added some thickness, grabbed some vertices around the open hole and deformed them outward.

In the opening six frames, I flashed the scene with a spotlight quite close to, and above, the sphere. Then there's a bulb light inside. That flashes the scene again as the pieces move farther away, and this light got color added in three frames: yellow, then red.

The FOG modifier gave both good results, and poor. What you see here was the best: vaporous, and swirls like cigarette smoke. In between these frames the modifier likes to go off on its own. In those frames it often looks like a jet of nasal spray, but largeish, like a cloud of buckshot. If I use it again, I will closely check the effects every few frames before doing a final render that I expect to show to anyone.

This was a satisfying excercise, though not what I started out to build. This is a good sci-fi effect, but does not look 'real'. I'll try to put some of your advice to work, and see you back here.

Now...about those pesky propeller discs?