Daryl, I agree, for safety reasons fusion drives should not be allowed to land. I can see ships being built with at least one sub-craft or with the fusion drive in a "second stage" and the main ship disengages and lands. On completion the main ship can then climb back to orbit and reconnect to the drive stage. As for decelerating, the ship could turn around to fly backwards and use the fusion drive to decelerate. The exhaust plume would be in front of the ship but both the ship and plume would be moving at the same speed. The ship would only need to use auxiliary thrusters to slow slightly allowing the plume to pull away and then to maneuver the ship into orbit.
The article I referred to about Heat Jet Thrusters I found in Missouri Archive-----Rules Modifications & Hard Science Discussions----Thrusters in Traveller written by Brendan O'Donovan Date Wed. 23 Aug 1995 21:07:32 -0700 (PDT). Below is a copy of the Heat Jet Stats directly from the article.
TH MCr MaxT FC FT Airframe
TL-9 Heat Jet 8 0.5 - 2.00 LHyd Hyper
Part of the article says that all realistic proposals (eg: from NASA) have in fact used your plasma drive, fueled by the reactor heat. I can't find out what NASA calls their thruster either.
I must admit that I agree with the thrusters article in one thing, FF+S's thrusters are under power. I will still use the rules in FF+S for consistency.