I got to wondering if the Columbia mishap would have been in any way survivable (no, for a number of reasons, though that might be another case for a personal reentry device). There is extensive data on it, including timelines and flight paths. I thought I would compare what Columia was expected to do vs what my model indicated the Hamiltonian did on reentry at Home (which is very earth-like). Given that Hamiltonian had a higher entry velocity, a lot of things came out pretty well: 

"Entry Interface" (EI) is defined by NASA as the point at which the orbiter crosses 400,000 feet, or 121920 meters. In the plot above, that's the point that Hamiltonian is marked at, with the blue arc representing flight from entry interface to touchdown. The distance between the space shuttle entry interface and touchdown is 4300 nautical miles, or about 71.5 degrees around the surface of the earth. Hamiltonian entry interface to touchdown was 105 degrees around Home. 

Columbia was "in excess of Mach 24" at EI, while Hamiltonian was at about Mach 28 and still increasing Mach somewhat, to Mach 30 a minute or so later. Hamiltonian heat flux peaks at 20,000 to 25,000 meters, the period of maximum deceleration. This is a lot lower than Columbia which was at maximum heating at 73,000 meters at Mach 24. This is probably due to the Orbiter following an orientation meant to more evenly distribute the deceleration through the atmosphere. Maximum heating does (possibly coincidentally) occur at about the same Mach number, Mach 24. It's likely Hamiltonian broke every window over a ground track of hundreds of miles due to the high Mach numbers at relatively low altitude, which is probably one of the reasons the Traveller spacer community dislikes the rogue-cowboy ballistic entries that a certain breed of pilots prefer. 

Time frames were very similar, with Hamiltonian taking 26m40s from EI to touchdown. 

I'm going to work on map generation and projection onto the world sphere so I don't keep re-using Europa as a texture and the ground hexes/triangles become meaningful to players. 

Another thing I want to look at (and wonder if anyone else has) is a much more sophisticated climate model. I use a simple equation to estimate equilibrium temperature (which makes use of static values for albedo and emissivity), but it would be interesting if traveller worlds could be modeled the way that the world of Westeros was: