Originally Posted by philip.ed

God, all the trolling here really says a lot for some of the forum members around here.
The OP makes a very good point, and the issue he mentions lay in the original Il-2 as well (many of the smoke effects there were horribly done. Almost as though the creator had been whipped into producing them extremely quickly).
As has been said, the .eff files usually determine (for instance) the length of time smoke lingers. The best example for comparison is Holy-Grail and Potenz's smoke effects for Il-2. They spent a lot of time getting the .eff values perfect, which makes their effects look really realistic. Smoke lingers realistically, and smoothly dissipates. It's a shame the same can't really be said for CloD, and I doubt it's something that will be looked at in the short-term TBH (unless by modders).