My understanding was that the wing tanks were not self sealing and were only used on ferry missions.
-blogs
Originally posted by Widewing
Dean does clearly state that the F4U-1C had greater internal fuel capacity (as did the F4U-1A) than the F4U-1D. Dean repeats this several times and provides basic charts as to this. I lean towards Dean because of his extensive collection of data and huge list of F4U references. I have other sources here that agree with Dean. It seems that the F4U-1C was simply a re-armed F4U-1A, which probably explains why the HTC version has less hard points.
Besides, the first F4U-1C was accepted 8 months before the first F4U-1D was accepted (August 1943, versus April 1944). This correlates to early F4U-1A production....
My regards,
Widewing
