The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

Is there some archive somewhere with the explosion animation reels of all the weapons from the Ur-Quan Masters? I just want to build similar explosions myself, but some of the ones from star control are pretty good and match the style of art I'm doing.

You'll find them all in the content.uqm file, which can be opened like a ZIP file.

I can view the image files for the different angles and sizes of the ships, but then there's these other files that I don't have a program to read. Do you know of some animation program I need to read them?

Really those other files are just text files that define the hotspots for all frames. You can read them with notepad if you want.

Well I can't seem to find the actual animation reels of the explosions, and those files don't give me an option to "open with..." so I can't even use notepad to read them.

You're not supposed to "open" stuff from an archive. You're supposed to extract the archive first.

There's still things that my media player can't read. I think I might even need a password for some of the files i try to extract with 7-zip.

These are still images and sequence files. they do not follow any standard/common format.  I don't think mediaplayer is able or supposed to read those. What you can do is something like this:
1) select the images with explosion parts
2) paste them all on same image
3) draw some identical boxes. to be future animation frames
4) from the explosion parts create the animation sequence frame-by-frame in the boxes
5) copy each box/frame into new image file
6) combine separate frames into animation using your animator of choice.
**the boxes are needed for centering the animation**
Good luck! 

Well what's in those files I can't open then? Is there some way I can alter the physics of the game to make a whole nother version?

I hope it doesn't sound too asshole'y, but you might want to get better with basics before attempting to build/modify games.

It generally is possible, look for Project6014, for example.