Two ways to spend the aim band, switchable in the panel

The laser look came from carrying the AIMING picture unchanged into the flight.
While you pull, a bright saturated line spanning you to the target is exactly
right — it is the information you are deciding on. Once fired it is spent, and
a projectile drawing its own future in a continuous saturated line from itself
to what it is about to hit is the visual definition of a targeting beam. No
real ball shows where it is going.

So a fired band now desaturates toward dust, collapses, and shrinks to a short
streak. TUNE.shotTail picks which side of the ball that streak sits on:
  0  a WAKE ahead of it, dissolving — your erase idea, beam cut down to a wisp
  1  a TAIL behind it, nothing ahead at all — conventional projectile language
The shadow follows the same slice, because "nothing ahead" has to include the
ground or it still gives the future away. The target mark fades with it: a mark
still burning on the shambler is the other half of the laser.

Both leave the aiming band untouched.

Built the collapse squared first and it was wrong — both variants were gone by
a third of the flight, which is not "less like a laser", it is no streak at all,
and the strobing at release is what this trail exists to prevent. Linear now.
The SHORT SLICE is what kills the beam; the fade only has to make sure nothing
is still burning when the ball lands.

Flip it live on the phone: T panel, shotTail, type 0 or 1.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

config.js

@@ -168,6 +168,10 @@ export const TUNE = {
                     // court — so every downward pull picked the same body and the angle felt inert.
                     // 0.10 gives ±2.9 m out there: you have to actually point at a lane.
   pullHintAfter: 1.5, // s of doing nothing in the serve stance before the pull gesture demos itself
+  shotTail: 0,      // HOW THE AIM BAND BEHAVES ONCE FIRED. 0 = a short WAKE ahead of the ball,
+                    // dissolving; 1 = a short TAIL behind it and nothing ahead at all. Both keep
+                    // the aiming band itself untouched — full arc, full colour, that part is the
+                    // information you act on. Flip it live in the T panel; it is read per frame.
   aimTie: 0.12,     // how much worse-aimed a NEARER body may be and still win the lane (0..1 of the
                     // cone half-width). 0 = pure best-aligned wins; 1 = the old "nearest in the
                     // lane always wins", which is what made the magnet grab the wrong shambler.