Ended up making the triangle windows by boolean, then manually tweeking edges & faces to fix the errors.  Used the knife projector to add missing windows.  Booleans are required to make that shape, but an easier way would be to cut the windows in a plane before solidifying the plane.  Also, a script should create the triangular window plug.

Your biggest allies in knife projecting are the cut through option for the knife projector & the mesh->show/hide menu option to hide faces you don't want to cut.  The mane problem is it doesn't select all the faces on one side of the knife projection.  You have to spend hours selecting faces to split a model into 2 halves.

Passenger eye view.

A lifetime of pain yielded pretty decent results for a 1st draft.  Knowing all the options affecting the knife projector should make the heat shield much easier.  Things didn't look so good in Godot, but a lot of antialiasing & fog managed to hide the crimes.

The windows are too big & low.  The glass needs to be cut into the shapes of the windows.  The triangle windows could use more tesselation.  The different objects aren't blending in.  These things all require scripting most of the modeling process.