Ben W
Chess Grandmaster (Supervised)
5 g's with aerobrake only is easy. It is more difficult to keep it at 3 g's. Density of atmosphere doubles every 5 km down (roughly). So to deaccelerate 2.5 g's instead of 5 g rocket needs to be 5 km higher. Aerodynamic lift is needed for that.
I imagine this is one of the primary purposes of the delta wings. It would be interesting to see what the most gradual reentry profile could be. With large enough wings it should be possible to have extremely mild deceleration all the way down, at the cost of a longer travel time.