Atmosphere speeding me up?

[A_name]

So I was reentering a Minmus lander into Kerbin when I noticed the atmosphere seemed to be accelerating my craft.

 

Note this was not a case of my speed increasing during descent due to gravity. The acceleration was much more significant than that. When I finally blew up at around 8 km altitude, I was on a Kerbin escape trajectory and going well over 4,000 m/s. The effect seemed to get worse the further down I fell into the atmo. Luckily I had a quicksave before reentering so I was able to try again several times, doing this and that differently, but still experiencing the issue. I even tried firing my engines retrograde but that actually seemed to make the problem worse (i.e. craft would speed up even more despite burning retro).

 

Curiously enough, the problem seemed to fix itself by extending my landing gear (medium sized landing struts) before reentering, so I suspect this was some phantom force caused by the gear clipping slightly into the body of the lander (the “butt” of the lander to which the legs were attached was a Mk2-Mk1 adapter, which is slanted, so the legs had to clip slightly into it in order to deploy with the “feet” parallel to the ground; I don’t have a screenshot at the moment, sorry).

 

Anyway, the problem was solved in this instance and I was able to land safely but I still wanted to post here in case others or I have this problem again (or in case someone wants to explore this as a Kraken Drive possibility!). Any input is greatly appreciated.

[bewing]

Known bug: http://bugs.kerbalspaceprogram.com/issues/8974