The killcam stays for the wreckage
We taught the spawn screen to wait for the killcam. It turned out it was still jumping the queue by a frame — and the replay itself cut to black at the exact instant you died, robbing you of the best part: the fireball and the long fall. Both fixed.
The flash before the replay
When you die to another pilot, the server doesn't have your killcam ready that same instant — it has to pack up the last several seconds of the fight and ship them to you. That's a brief gap, and the respawn screen was sneaking into it: for a frame or two you'd see the hangar card slam up, then get yanked away as the replay started. A flicker, but a cheap-looking one, right at the most dramatic moment of a sortie.
The spawn screen now knows a killcam is coming, not just whether one is already playing. The moment you go down to an attacker it holds its tongue and lets the killer-cam keep orbiting your smoking aircraft until the real replay lands. If the clip never shows up — a hiccup, a dropped packet — the screen falls through after a short beat instead of hanging forever. Fly into a hill with nobody to credit and there's no replay coming, so the hangar still appears at once.
Don't cut on the kill
The bigger miss: the replay ended on the frame you died. You'd watch the attacker walk their tracers onto you, the hit lands, and — cut. No explosion to sit with, no wreckage tumbling out of the sky. The killcam was a sentence with the last word clipped off.
So the server keeps rolling tape past the kill. It now holds your replay back a couple of seconds before sending it, and spends that time recording the aftermath: the fireball, the debris, the killer peeling off the target. The clip you get runs from the buildup straight through the wreckage — about eight seconds end to end, with the last few of them spent on the part you actually want to see. The respawn timer stretches to match, so the hangar still arrives exactly as the replay finishes and the TAKE OFF button unlocks on cue.
A death is a story beat, not a state transition. The instant of the kill is the climax; cutting there is like ending the scene on the trigger pull and never showing what it hit.
One uninterrupted beat
Put together, the sequence finally reads the way it should: you go down, the camera holds on your falling aircraft, the replay rolls from the killer's seat through the explosion and the long tumble after, and only then does the hangar slide up for your next ride. No flash, no early cut — just the whole story of how you bought it, start to wreckage.