Which P-47 is best?

[Nilsen]

correct Sancho... Saw a dok on Discovery where they took off from cv and landed on a makeshift airfield somewhere in the pacific

[Lephturn]

Originally posted by Jack55
P-47 is for destroying enmy fghtrs.  I prefer the D-25 for the bubble and dark paint.  I usually load half fuel and the belly tank.
Jugs need firepower.  Take eight guns with maximum ammunition and an eager trigger finger.
Whenever you meet the enemy, you should be diving, for this is what jugs do.

Diving at a merge will generally get you killed quickly.  Much better to dive gently before you merge and hide your energy advantage in speed.  At the merge, you almost always want to be going UP as you pass.  Any time you merge diving, you are giving up big chunks of your energy advantage as you overshoot below the enemy.  That's a bad idea in a Jug.  Better to save that fantastic dive performance for when you've exploded your enemy and need to escape from that higher incoming bogey.

[SFRT - Frenchy]

What fantastic dive performance?

[Nilsen]

aggree frenchy....dive performance is far from fantastic..its good..not great

[gripen]

Scootter,
The dive flaps added a lot of drag. In the case of the P-47 and at speed mach 0.72 the drag (Cd) raised from 0.03 to 0.048 with dive flaps. In the case of the P-38 there was pretty similar drag  rise.  One of the main functions of the dive flaps was to keep the plane out of trouble by adding a lot of drag at high speeds. At low speeds the drag rise was less but still signifiqant.

gripen

[Jack55]

Originally posted by Lephturn


Diving at a merge will generally get you killed quickly.  Much better to dive gently before you merge and hide your energy advantage in speed.  At the merge, you almost always want to be going UP as you pass.  Any time you merge diving, you are giving up big chunks of your energy advantage as you overshoot below the enemy.  That's a bad idea in a Jug.  Better to save that fantastic dive performance for when you've exploded your enemy and need to escape from that higher incoming bogey.

I meant have such a substantial altitude advantage to require a dive to be in gun range.

[gofaster]

Thanks for the info, gentlemen.  I've only flown the P-47s 5 times and got killed stupidly each time.  I figured some things just weren't meant to be, so once I get a little more combat experience, I'll revisit the Jug.  I'm still gunshy from the horrible flight model it had on "Air Warrior" many moons ago, and am having trouble accepting it as a viable fighter.  On the other hand, I was able to take a P-40 out and bag a couple of kills over the weekend.  Go figure.