this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2023
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6 million dollars apiece is cheap?
The F35 costs about 80 million and they sell like hotcakes. Yes, 6 million is cheap.
Oh okay. I didn't realize that. Wow.
Every bolt and river has to have its entire history accounted for in case it fails
F35A is now down to about $70 million/piece now, which further demonstrates the point of costs coming down with mass production I think.
It originally was more like $150 million.
It's almost unbelievably cheap for a combat aircraft - over five times cheaper than an MQ-9 Reaper drone, which costs 32 million. (And Reapers aren't capable of air-to-air combat, although they have other capabilities that these drones will probably lack.) Manned fighters cost even more. An F-35 is 80 million, and it's a relatively low-priced jet. An F-22 costs about twice as much. Even a single Sidewinder air-to-air missile is 400 thousand.
It’s more like 2.5 billion for R&D and then 2.5 billion to create the factory that builds them and the first thousand units. The per unit cost is initially high and then comes down once all the front end work is done.
And as with many programs, the R&D phase may lead to a brand new use-case for drones or an entirely different purpose for one of the drone prototypes. So there can be unknown benefits too.