The new ship showed up in the menus, but not in flight. Not because the file was missing — it sat right there on the server. It was because the flight scene only added a cache-busting stamp to its graphics on localhost, never on the live site. And the server hands out ship images with seven days of cache time.
So the browser had the old ship cached and would have kept showing it for a week.
Hangar and loadout were fine — they’ve stamped their own image addresses since 0.88.0. That explains exactly what people saw: new ship in the menu, old one in the game.
The flight scene now stamps with the version too, for every game graphic, not just the ship — this exact bug already caught out a swapped Core sprite once before.