All good comments by knowledgeable contributors.
Some of those are a lot easier than others
Not sure what the fascination is the P-66. It is a modified trainer and it is only going to take you so far. Not only that but you need a time machine to get R-1830-76 engines in 1940 in any quantity. The only built 98 two stage engines in 1940 and 81 of them were in the last 4 months.
I like it!
It was designed by the same designer of the Hughes H-1, so he certainly knew how to make fast airplanes. It was much faster than the Curtiss Hawk or the XP-41 and, with the new engine, could possibly be as fast as the P-40D, and would probably put it in the speed range of the Bf 109E and Spitfire II. It also seems that the pilots liked it. Oh, recommendation 13. Expedite the introduction and manufacturing of the R-1830-75 engine.
Side thought: Since the P-66 was 30-40 mph faster than the similar engined P-36A, how much faster would an Allison powered P-66 be over the P-40. As is, the streamlined Vanguard prototype was faster than the more powerful P-40 (1 mph
).
The P-47 could easily hold more fuel, they got it up to 370 gallons in the later ones without a behind the seat tank. Trouble is trying to fight with an extra 65 gallons (390lbs) and bigger tank with the original engine and propeller. P-47s first went into action in April 1943, water injection doesn't show up until Oct/Nov? and the paddle blade props start showing up in Dec. 43.
You are correct but it's turbo-supercharged horsepower would still command the air above 25k, being 800 hp more than the Bfs and Fws. In addition, just the psychological impact to the defenders that there could be eight fifty cals above them ready to swoop down with a lot of energy and firepower, could be very distracting and would make attacking the bombers more complex and dangerous. Without this, history shows that the bombers would be very vulnerable.
I am not sure that angled flight decks would Help the US that much with piston engine aircraft. The US, in general, had much larger flight decks than the RN and tended to fly off the majority of the aircraft when launching a strike, only catapulting enough aircraft to get enough deck length to enable the rest to fly off.
I must admit that I am not an expert in this area but there is several areas in which the angled deck would be a significant advantage. One, of course is safety. The landing aircraft is moving away from the island providing a bit more error tolerance (there's that video of an F6F crashing into the island). Also, I suspect that running into the net could cause damage to the aircraft, including engine, and, failure of the net could cause catastrophic damage to other aircraft and possibly the ship.
The ability of landing aircraft at the same time launching activities are occurring appears to be a significant advantage, especially in air to ground support where an aircraft makes one or two passes and then needs to rearm while other launches are occurring, or, aircraft are returning from a mission low on fuel and combat air patrol needs to launch to address and incoming threat, which was a major problem with the Japanese at Midway.
I don't know if this was possible for ww2 operations, but if simultaneous (or alternating) launches of aircraft from straight and angled deck were possible, strike airborne assembly time could be almost halved, reducing fuel consumption, extending range/time on target and strike timing.
Most piston engine planes had enough acceleration in hand that wave-offs were not a big problem. This was not the case with jet aircraft in the 40s and 50s
I don't think wave offs were a particular issue. I suspect both jets and props flew at similar approach speeds based on the aircraft, probably something like 1.3 Vstall so their safety margins were the same. Early jet engines did spin up much slower than props but they were very draggy on approach and probably had a pretty high throttle setting. I think they were well trained on wave-offs all the way down to cut throttle signal. If either messed up after that, neither was likely have a successful bolt. I think the main problem was missed or broke arresting wire.