I was really bummed when - some years back now - I read a post here to the effect that if you had a working contragrav system, there was no reason you couldn't just hover your way gently down to a world's surface from orbit. No more exciting, comet-like reentries!

Then a while later I realized that if you posited use of a combination turbo/ram/scram/fusion thruster system to get to orbit (like I do IMTU, inspired by Firefly/Serenity) then you DO still need a comet-like reentry . . . because after clawing your way out the jump point via fusion thrust from the departure world, you need to use the destination world's atmosphere to ablate away your residual velocity in order to land.

[Ships IMTU can't steal a bit of jump fuel to pay for full-thrust deceleration, since one of the many ways in which MTU is heretical is that jump drives simply work (or not), without need of any fuel. This doesn't change things much for naval forces - invaders still need to skim gas giants in order to have enough fuel reserves to contest control of high orbit around a mainworld - but it means commercial ships rarely skim. Not only is it dangerous, but the microjump needed to reach the mainworld costs too much time.]