Some interesting thing I came upon in my career mode

[The Space Dino]

So, I was delivering some tourists back home with the spacecraft above, but this design has pretty weird aerodynamic properties. If I angle my spacecraft upwards too high, after it slows down below 1000 m/s it will be uncontrollable and fall like a rock into the ground (or sea). So here, I angled my spacecraft below the horizon and it turns out, this thing actually started increasing in altitude.

Might be a basis for a body lift design?

[Spricigo]

2 hours ago, The Space Dino said:

Might be a basis for a body lift design?

Maybe It was indeed the effect of aerodynamic forces that made it start to climb again. But I'd not hold my breath in doing it part of a useful and efficient desing.  Angling the fuselage also added a lot of drag which is very undesirable for atmospheric flight. 

A different explanation is you just passed the periapsis of your trajectory that happened to be well above the surface. Falling but missing the ground.

 

Btw, I think you should have posted it in the Gameplay Question subforum. Anyway, I suppose a moderator will move it if necessary. 

[magnemoe]

Good chance the MK1 part has some lifting body effect even if round, the MK3 pars has even if mostly square. 
To me it looks like your are flying with nose / heatshield forward and above horizon, if you have lift that will trade speed for attitude. 
And yes you can easy use up all your forward speed this way, you can re gain horizontal speed by gaining speed by falling down and then level out. 
 

[The Space Dino]

9 minutes ago, magnemoe said:

Good chance the MK1 part has some lifting body effect even if round, the MK3 pars has even if mostly square. 
To me it looks like your are flying with nose / heatshield forward and above horizon, if you have lift that will trade speed for attitude. 
And yes you can easy use up all your forward speed this way, you can re gain horizontal speed by gaining speed by falling down and then level out. 
 

Funny thing is, it can't level out after going into a dive. It'll just fall at Mach 1 to its doom.

[Geonovast]

1 hour ago, The Space Dino said:

Funny thing is, it can't level out after going into a dive. It'll just fall at Mach 1 to its doom.

Do you not have drogue chutes unlocked?

[The Space Dino]

On 9/8/2017 at 9:09 PM, Geonovast said:

Do you not have drogue chutes unlocked?

Nope

[Xyphos]

ksp physics are weird at best, tho your image show a negative ascent, your vessel lacks lifting surfaces, the round body shouldn't induce too much drag, I won't rule out the possibility, tho I find it very unlikely.

[Cunjo Carl]

Yep yep! You can in fact control your descent with body drag by tilting your craft up or (perilously) down. This is especially handy for Duna, where the atmospheric sweet spot is so small, and you want to stay in it for as long as possible. If your Periapsis is still in front of you, you can watch your projected Pe altitude change to judge how your control is going. When you get things just right, you can dive into the soupy part of the atmosphere and stay there without getting too deep! In practice, it requires a ton of batteries for your poor little reaction wheels to manage, but can still be a fun+worthwhile approach.

As a note, the Mk1. cockpit now has a wing area of 0.35 (equivalent to .035 tons of wing, like the AV-T1 winglet - the grey rounded one no one ever uses). The added loftiness probably helps!

[The Space Dino]

@Cunjo Carl thanks for the tips, who knows when I'm going to screw up my Duna mission, eh?