Not sure... I admit that I've never seen that in any of the playtests for the FF mod, but then again, I was looking at the target area, not the launch site.... I patterned the animations off the original ICBM, so it should work like the original ICBM.... Although it would seem that they made an "Updated" version for C3C.... In that version, it has 42 frames for the attack animation (which is bigger, vertically, than a unit FLC should be), the first 22 of which are the missile going up.... I'm going to try and create a new attack flic for the meteor that mimics this set-up, only with the first 22 frames blank, and the normal falling frames padded out to 20 somehow and see if that solves the problem for you.
EDIT: Actually, I just opened the PTW ICBM trail.flc (the launch and fall), and it appears that, unlike the original ICBMfall.flc, It has TWO directions, rather than 1. The SW direction would be the launch, and the S direction would be the fall.... Unfortunately, due to the wierd size of the file, I could not manipulate and re-export the new ICBM flc at the current Meteor fall size, and then just insert blank frames for the SW direction and leave the current MeteorFall.flc in the S direction.... As it is, I don't think ANY of the FLIC editors can make FLCs with only two directions from scratch, so It would appear to be unfixable.... Unless I could make a full-8direction animation in FLICster and just hope the game will only use the first two directions....
Here's my attempt to work around the problem... please tell me if it works: