Let the ship explode before the debrief

[jordan-bravo]

Taking the fatal hit spawned a fireball and called finish in the same frame, and finish calls clearArena, which calls fx.clear. The explosion existed for one frame and was then wiped by the thing that replaced it. In practice the hull vanished and the stat screen appeared.

A loss now seals its result and hands the next 2.4 seconds to the wreck:

• 0.00s the hull is still there. Dead, unsteerable, coasting on its last velocity, tumbling, venting sparks, cooking white-hot, with two small ruptures walking across it.
• 0.55s the ship goes. Big detonation, hard camera shake, hull hidden.
• 0.95s cook-offs out in the debris, then it burns down.
• 2.40s debrief.

The tumble is applied to the visual only. The chase camera sits in the ship's own frame, so rotating player.quaternion would spin the shot rather than the hull and make the last two seconds unwatchable. The squadron keeps flying and bolts keep travelling underneath it — freezing the arena on the death frame reads as the game crashing rather than as a kill — and none of it can touch the player, since step and takeDamage both bail on a dead hull and bolts skip anything untargetable.

Two things fell out of it:

• The result is sealed at the moment of death rather than read at finish. The arena runs for two more seconds, which is long enough for a hostile to fly into the star and post a bounty to a pilot who is already dead. elapsed stops too, so a loss no longer records the length of its own explosion as flight time.
• The game refuses to pause while dying. Escape mid-explosion — or the pointer lock the browser drops when you press it — otherwise parks a pause menu in front of the fireball with a debrief queued behind it.

ending is gone: dying covers the death path and active already covered the win path, so it guarded nothing.

Verification: npm run check green — typecheck, the existing simcheck suite including the seeded end-to-end run, the balance contract, plus ten new assertions driving a real run onto a mine and checking the handoff. Not verified in a browser; there is no display on this box.

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Project	Deployment	Actions	Updated (UTC)
neon-orbit	Ready	Preview	Aug 6, 2026 11:07am