Nate Bro: I actually think the smoke is a bit poor. It is a bunch of morphing lumpy objects, but I should have made them less regular. The bulk of the flame effect was added frame by frame in Corel Photopaint, post rendering.
Sciwizeh: The re-entry effect used a parabolic cone shape, with a double-sided material: outside transparent, inside orange emissive with a gradient texture applied bottom to top in the emissive field (with a bit of after touching in Corel). The explosions used a combination of modelled flying debris, lights with changing colours, and post-rendering frame-by-frame retouching.
The cockpit instrument panels are open faced boxes with black interiors, and all instrument displays were added later with the exception of the wire globe and roll indicator. These were mesh spheres placed within the dashboard box with their position origins relative to the cockpit (which moved and rolled through the scene), but their orientation origins fixed to the "world". With the camera fixed to the cockpit, the globes appear to roll, while in fact it is the cockpit and camera that are rolling while the globes remain still. The artificial horizon indicator again uses double sided materials, with a transparent outer face. The lower half of the globe is green inner/transparent outer, and the upper half is blue inner/transparent outer. So the face you see is actually the inside of this sphere.