sonaxaton

Thanks Rocketeer, this answer makes the most sense to me. So if they wanted to fix this they'd have to make a more accurate model, namely by bending it slightly so it was sphere-flat not plane-flat.

This may be a bug or intentional, I'm not sure, but I think it's inaccurate and somewhat annoying. I noticed one time when I was testing a moon base on KSC's launchpad that every time I used the engine and RCS to lift upward slightly, my base would always drift in the same direction. I was pretty damn sure it was staying perfectly vertical, so I had no idea why this was happening. You can see this pretty easily if you build a small, very stable rocket and throttle the engine just enough to float a few meters in the air for a few seconds. If you touch back down gently, you'll be slightly off the center of the launchpad. I realized this direction is always West, and I think I know why. Kerbin's atmosphere applies drag to spaceships, slowing down their speed. Vertically this works fine, but I think what happens horizontally is that as the planet spins to the East, the atmosphere stays still on top of it. When your ship lifts off the ground, it had rotational momentum equal to Kerbin's and is "thrown" to the East along with the planet. But since the atmosphere is not turning, drag tries to "slow you down" relative to the atmosphere, and you drift slightly West compared to the surface. In reality I'm pretty sure this doesn't happen, but I could be wrong. Kerbin is much smaller than Earth, and spins much faster, so it just might be more noticeable. But I think that the atmosphere turns with the Earth, so if you jump up in the air, it doesn't pull you back to the West since you're not moving horizontally relative to the atmosphere. This effect is much more noticeable when you just launch a rocket into space directly up. You'll notice that you get a parabolic flight path even though you went straight up, since again the atmosphere is dragging you horizontally. This might be slightly more realistic since I think higher up the atmosphere doesn't spin as fast as the Earth. I could be wrong about all this though, if anyone knows more physics than I do please share. If I am right though I think they should fix this, at least for the case where you're only a few meters off the ground, since it's also pretty annoying that craft hovering off the ground will drift horizontally.