An interesting Areospike engine design I've found

[DStaal]

I was reading through the Atomic Rockets site, and came across what would be an interesting and useful engine (if it's possible) in KSP.  It's on the bottom of this ship:

The point from where the landing legs end down is the engine: It's a truncated areospike, with a heat-shield built on the end.  The overall design is for a single-stage-to-orbit reusable craft: It can take off and do a powered landing using the areospike engine, and use the heat-shield for reentry.

I'm not entirely sure if the KSP aerodynamics model could handle such a part - obviously it depends on the shockwave extending outwards from the shield itself - but it would be an interesting part (or two parts - the engine and a heat shield that's designed to fit on it), and I could see it being very useful for things like landing on Duna.

[TheDestroyer111]

Hmm...

I wonder if this could work, but...

Heat shields do exist and work in stock KSP, and it's totally not because of shock waves. And technically, anyone with solid knowledge of messing around with config files in KSP can make something that would use the Heat shield module with ablator (or just a part with high heat tolerance) that would also technically be an engine, and it would probably use the heat shield's model and texture (if they aren't made from the ground up).

[DStaal]

What I'm worried about is if the heat shield could actually shield the rest of the ship - even if it's designed with a taper.  The ship design looks like it uses the shockwave and the taper to keep the rest of the ship from burning up - that's what I'm worried about working.