Big wings do not give high rate of climb.
This is a fallacy.
If you clip wings you can improve the rate of climb.
Climb is pretty much governed by the power to weight you have
after you deduct the power needed to fly at climbing speed.
Slap a big wing on an aircraft and you increase the drag which means you have less power to use for climb after you get the plane u to 160-180mph or whatever the best speed for climb is.
Jets have sort of a double whammy because jets don't make a lot of power at low speeds. Bad phrasing, their power doesn't work efficiently at low speed. Kind of a like a prop stuck in the wrong pitch.
Jets were also heavy, they were carrying a crap load of fuel.
P-59A went about 10,900lbs clean and held 290 US gallons of fuel internal.
P-63 went about 8,800lbs clean and held 126 US gallons of fuel internal.
They may have wanted the big wing for better take-off and landing.
Or they may have wanted it for fuel storage, or both.
290 gallons was good for about 240 miles of range at 20,000ft. A pair of 150 US gal drop tanks got you up to 520 miles.
Remember that the engine power was changing about every other time the airframe designers turned around.
April 1942 has 1250lb thrust, then 1400lb, then 1600lbs and the engines used in the YP-59s were supposed to give 1650lbs. The engines in the first 3 prototypes gave closer to 1300lbs as installed.
Some P-59Bs got 2000lb thrust engines after sitting in storage for a while so make sure you are comparing the right aircraft/engine combo.
Thrust is not power. Jet plane running at full throttle with brakes locked and wheels chocked is make no "power". Power needs a time element.
One horsepower is a unit of power equal to 550
foot-pounds per second.
Without the time element you have a force like torque.
A jet engine can gain "power" as the static thrust declines because the engine/aircraft is moving faster.
An early version of the engines used in the McDonnell FH-1 Phantom were rated at 1400lbs static at sea level.
However the engines were rated at 525lbs thrust at 500mph at 30,000ft.
Which was enough to get this
to do about 500mph at 30,000ft.
But we are dealing with different formulas. You need to know the veleocity of the exhaust gas leaving the jet engines (through the nozzles) and the mass and compare that to the speed of the aircraft.