Replacing laser projectile with institute rifle

[OrangePulp]

I'd like to replace the (red) laser projectile with the (blue) institute rifle projectile, simply because I much prefer the look of the blue laser. I figured it would be as simple as grabbing the files for the institute rifle projectile with the archive extractor, renaming them to the ones for the regular laser, and then dropping them in the data folder. However, I haven't been able to identify what files make up either one. Does anyone have some insight into this?

[DigChrono]

In Fallout 3 and New Vegas, projectiles were an option for weapons in the GECK. Basically you could select a projectile from a list, so you could have a sniper rifle that fires missiles, for instance. I don't know if replacing the mesh would do it, and I doubt that this will be possible until we have a GECK, unless a very good unofficial tool comes along.

[OrangePulp]

So, are the projectiles not really stored anywhere? I would normally think that, even as a separate property, they exist as a set of files somewhere. My idea is to basically overwrite all red lasers in the game, with the files from the blue laser; that way, I shouldn't have to modify the properties of the gun itself, it's just that the file it pulls for the projectile ends up being blue instead of red, due to the override. However, if the color is stored as a numeric value somewhere, rather than a discrete model/mesh/texture/whatever, I guess that's not really an option. I saw that someone modded the mini-nukes into the baby, and so thought that I might be able to get a similar sort of swap going.

[OrangePulp]

So, as an update, I unpacked the .ba2 files for meshes and models, and went through and put copies of all the files I saw with laser and LtBlue, renamed to their red variants, into the appropriate data folders (namely Meshes, and Textures\Effects).

 

Files replaced in Meshes:

ImpactLaserMusket01Red.nif
ImpactLaserRedSmall.nif
ImpactLaserVsShell.nif
LaserBeamFocusRed01.nif
LaserBeamLoopRed.nif
LaserMusketProjectile.nif
LaserPowerBeamRed.nif
LaserRifleBeamRed.nif
LaserSmallBeamRed.nif
MPSLaserImpactSparks.nif
MPSLaserWaveImpact.nif
MPSMuzSmokeLaser01.nif
MPSMuzSparksLaser02.nif
MuzLaserMusket01.nif
MuzLaserRifle01.nif
MuzLaserRifleSuper02.nif 

Files replaced in Textures\Effects:

LaserImpactWaveGrad.dds
SmokeLaserMuzFlash01Grad.dds
WepLaserRed01Grad.dds
WepLaserRedRingGrad.dds
WepSuperLaserLightGrad.dds

Seems like that would be enough, but everything (beam, death animations, etc.) all still show up red. If the color wasn't tied to those files, but a variable somewhere else, why have two copies of them at all?