[idea] mk2 format heatshielding for spaceplanes?

[JH4C]

After various false starts and missteps, I'm finally getting somewhere with designing spaceplanes. I've just built a "tiny" spaceplane that can achieve orbit from takeoff in about 50 seconds, but there's a snag - re-entry. If I just use a ballistic path to take me into space and then drop me back into the atmosphere, I'm not losing very much speed and the front parts of my ship soon overheat and explode. Sure I could possibly try reversing in and letting the engines take the brunt of it but that feels like a cop-out, so what's presumably needed is some form of heat management. I don't know if strapping radiators on would help, I can't see them doing wonders for my aerodynamics and they'd probably make gaining orbit much more expensive.

My thought is to have a device either that sits inside a cargo bay or is based on one. When triggered, an inflatable heatshield could be deployed, and once speeds have dropped outside of the danger zone it could either be deflated or dropped (maybe restorable by an engineer?).

I'm using the Kn-7 cockpit from the Kerbonov mod which is a very distinct mk2 format cockpit which has the wider access oriented vertically. This pack also includes a "side"-opening cargo bay, so if the heatshield was a part designed to be carried inside cargo bays, the same part would work in this bay as in any of the stock ones; it might be an idea to have some kind of extendable arm to shift the origin a little further out, or you could just make it with an arm long enough to reach outside the longer axis as standard as this would also fit the stock bays without modification. I'm mostly thinking that the shield would be similar to the 10m inflatable, although if you had it pop out of both sides of the cargobay then I suppose you might be able to make it more spherical, possibly oblate or egg-shaped.

Anyway, just a thought I've had bouncing around my head for a day or two. Feel free to pick it apart or ignore it.

[JadeOfMaar]

@JH4C Unless I'm mistaken or the information is obsolete, I've read that surface-attached heatshields don't work well. The best idea I can suggest is a pointed cockpit, however a significant forward portion of it, from the tip, would be a swappable part and an inflating heatshield, or give ablator to the cockpit just as the underside of any irl space shuttle.

Personal experience has told me enough by now that radiators work well in vacuum and in thick atmosphere but not in thin atmosphere where you need them most.