I finally have some results. I'd have to say the greatest thing I learned is that good results cost a lot,,,, of render time. Too much for the resources I have available to me. 5 hours/frame for a relatively low res output is not something I can deal with but there is something to remember about fx shots for movies; you don't render anymore that you will actually use. In my tests, I rendered the ship flying in, splashing down, then let the camera linger on the aftermath. In a real shot I might have actually only rendered 24 frames from the splashdown. Those are the most expensive frames. The ship flying around takes mere seconds to render. It's the particles that make up the splash that cost a lot.
I also ran some tests with upscaling the low res footage. It is very promising. I was able to upres the images to 400% their original size with no problem. Maybe I'll post some side by side image for comparison later. For now, here are my results. I hope you don't mind that I didn't upload the video to Youtube. Because of the resolution of the tests, 466x200 I'm afraid their upscaling would make it look like crap. Plus, using HTML5s built in ability to show video, you should be able to scroll through the video one frame at a time if you want to study it. I found you can make it play full screen and although it doesn't look great, it's not bad consider the resolution of the video.
Kam splashdown