How does the Re-Entry heat mechanic work exactly??

[SpaceSmith]

So I just started my career up, its been a while and I know they have added re-entry heat to be deadly.. so all I see are the ablative heat shields... what do we use for space planes and not capsule type rockets??

Also on that note, I had a probe come in at a really shallow angle at something like 2300 meters per second on Kerbin and it lit up the heat shield for a good 5 minutes, I mean it glowed orange to white hot... except the ablative never depleted??? Im curious, shouldn't it have gone down??

I just am having trouble understanding how the mechanic works is all.. any help would be appreciated.

[Anquietas314]

In stock 1.0.2, re-entry heat is massively underpowered (see this thread for testing), but for future reference (or if you want to use the reentry heat rebalance mod) airbrakes work pretty well for spaceplanes and rockets without heatshields . If you want, there's an option in the debug menu (alt/mod + F12 by default) to add detailed information about the heating (under physics -> thermal). It's useful for figuring out why things are overheating (or not in this case).