Traveller 5 seems to be designed as an attempt to be flexible toward varying campaign universes, as rules are included for slower than light interstellar travel and meteoric atmospheric (re)entry. [that's always bugged me, a starship built in space and entering the atmosphere for the first time isn't reentering, it's just entering].

There are a couple of places that meteoric reentry can be relevant even to non-technical Traveller campaigns: stray warshot intersecting a world will undergo meteoric reentry and it might be interesting to calculate plausible impact sites for that. As we remember from the Chelyabinsk meteor, there might be an atmospheric event witnessed by many on the ground that, depending on general education level and tech level of the society, might be interpreted as the gods returning, a weapons test by an enemy nation-state, or the starting shot of an invasion. The object falling might be something valuable and the players may wish to collect it, or the object falling may be from somewhere valuable and the players want to back-propagate the computed orbit to its origin.

So, taking the same good ship Hamiltonian, this time in low orbit of Home, and applying a deorbit impulse of 800 m/s, and modeled as a conical starship of about 800 Dtons, with a height to radius ratio of 10:1 with a frontal surface area of 328.6 m^2, and a drag coefficient of 0.22 and a mass of 75 tons (that's very light, I only modeled the outer hull, which has implications for the terminal phase of reentry) the reentry looks something like this:

Maximum deceleration felt to the passengers, unless compensated (unlikely in an escape pod?) is in excess of 13 g. I didn't compute heat flux, which will be next, but that's generally velocity^3 * air density, and likely to be maximized just during the run up to highest deceleration just prior to 0.10 hours on the chart. I imagine that the points of highest heat flux will also be where luminosity is highest during reentry.

There are other possible implications, even with the typical 1-2g acceleration available to Traveller starships, at some points during reentry air resistance would overpower even that and the ships will be, temporarily, at the mercy of normal physics. If the players decided to start a meteoric reentry for whatever reason. I can also imagine situations in which starships with 1 or 2 g acceleration could get themselves in trouble fuel skimming a large enough gas giant.

The model isn't good enough to be used in a game yet, in supersonic and hypersonic flight the effective drag coefficient changes and I use direct "Standard Atmospheric Density Model" for density of atmosphere vs height, and that's for Earth specifically. I'll need to generalize it a bit to other worlds.

I know that the majority of Traveller games won't concern themselves with this sort of thing, but I ran across Chelyabinsk meteor videos and that got me thinking about Traveller.