I give up on volumetrics.....just can't control them. Been trying to get a grip on  them for weeks now and with very little success. So, I went into the material editor yesterday, bound and determined to not come out again until I had some kind of special effect...with or without volumetrics.

This is what I had by this afternoon.....a quite passable explosion without volumetrics...just lots of fractal transparencies and color distributions.

To illustrate, I torched one of my Rim ships lol.....