The P-47 wing, or What am I looking at?

[Voyager]

Interesting. I'll have to check into that. I have found a copy of the NACA Report 824, and will dig into that after I finish In Pursuit.

I'm just curious about it. I was thinking about how every Seversky/Republic aircraft I know of, from the initial debut up to the jet age used an elliptical wing with the S-3 airfoil, from their 230mph amphibian, to the 470 mph P-47M. And while nearly every other fighter that was re-winged with one of the new laminar flow airfoils saw major performance improvements, the P-47 didn't, and was still just as fast as every other prop-job in the air. This begs the question, why?

Is there something particular about the S-3 airfoil that makes it competitive with the laminar flow airfoils, that other widely used airfoils lacked? If so, why wasn't it more widely used: design ownership, a significant trade off, a different set of design priorities, something else? Was it just a quick of the Seversky designs that laminar flow didn't do much?

And of course, while trying to dig up stuff on the S-3, I also discovered that the FW-190, F4F, F6F, and F4U all share the same airfoil, and have radically different handling behaviours. And then there's the Clark YH, and the NACA 2219, so as you can see, my questions are multiplying without end.

Addendum: Command Prompt does not scare me, I've been using DOS since before I could read!
Though I will admit, some of the tutorials on .bat scripting get a bit ominous. And now we set up the logger to load without being visible to the user!