This isn't something I was going to blog about, but after seeing the same issue a few times recently (although to be fair, last in a mobile game), I thought I'd share it with my audience.
The result of the API call will contain a count variable, and if it's zero, it means we have no data. If it's anything else, we can render a list of ships.
The solution is to simply add a loading message... I'll fix the issue with HTML: <ul id="shipsList"> <li><i>Loading ships...</i></li> </ul>
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