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[The Expanse] Epstein drives create enough heat to disintegrate everything in the drive's radius. How do ships not burn themselves after a flip-and-burn, as they fly into the exhaust of the drive?

So I just finished all the Expanse books, and generally loved how gravity, thrust, space travel and directionality were handled in the series. One thing that always bothered me was the question of heat after ships performed the flip half way through their journey.

After the flip, the ships fly essentially engine-first through space, so that the deceleration gives the people inside the ship a tolerable quasi-gravity. And the direction of that gravity is the same as through the acceleration burn. So far so good.

However, we know that you can't fire your Epstein drive when you are in proximity to space stations or other objects, as the drive's heat exhaust would "slag" everything behind it, i.e. disintegrate everything into a cloud of tiny atoms.

For example when: (Spoiler for Caliban's War)

>![That proto molecule monster that snuck onto the ship is destroyed by throwing it off and firing the drives.]

Or when: (Spoiler for Babylon's Ashes)

>![The Solano was parked next to Pallas Station's dock to slag every ship that tries to leave with its drive.]

How then is that prevented after a ship performs a flip and burn? It now flies directly into the exhaust of its own drive. Shouldn't that be way too hot to travel through? Does the heat dissipate fast enough in the vacuum so that the ship never flies through it?
gpt
First off when a ship accelerates to the turnover point it reaches a velocity, let's call it V. V=time of flight to turnover (T) × acceleration rate (A), so V=TA and after turnover before lighting off the drives again it's still going at V away from the exhaust before accelerating on the opposite direction (effectively turning A into -A in that equation reversing the direction of apparent gravity except the interior of the ship is also flipped around too so it'll seem the same for the crew).

When the exhaust exits the drive it moves in the opposite direction to the ship's acceleration from the ship's point of reference. That means even if it's effectively moving in the same direction as the ships it will alway be moving slower than the ship while it's acceleration and faster than the ship while it's decelerating (it's the same thing really, just flipped), and the exhaust particles will only be dangerous for a a fraction of a second after leaving the ship as they disperse very quickly (partially because they aren't particularly coherent but mostly because space is a vacuum that will pull them in all directions once there isn't anything holding them together).