The original design for what became the Spitfire had straight taper. The elliptical planform happened because the man from the ministry kept demanding more guns.
There wasn't enough depth to accommodate them. The two options were to increase chord outboard or to increase t/c. Mitchell was a clever man, so he opted for the former.
However, the subtext of this was that he didn't anticipate a production run of 20,000+, mostly built in shadow factories.
He thought that Supermarine would probably make a few hundred at most, and therefore the extra work entailed in a nightmare of compound curves was quite a neat way of making work to keep his company in business.
I suspect that had he not died before his time, the Spitfire would probably have been rapidly been replaced by a more practical follow-on aeroplane with straight taper, or perhaps polytaper; though perhaps more interesting still is the possibility that fighter work might have been entirely handed to Hawker so that Supermarine could concentrate on their bomber, which was effectively a 4 engined heavy with Mosquito speed...
Meanwhile the P-47 was very fast going downhill, but had quite a low tactical Mach number, and was also rather a nightmare to manage due to the extra workload and failuremodes inherent in the turbo.
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05-13-2011, 11:23 PM
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