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Comment by cnvogel | Hacker News Reader

Is it just me, or does $19M sound ridiculously low for building a prototype of a military vessel?

Most larger yachts that are built for rich people seems to cost around this ballpark, and for them I would expect that no new technology has to be integrated from scratch, in to the core design (as in: motors, geometry of the hull). Exceptionally ugly boats, like Venus built for the late Steve Jobs claim to cost $100M!.

With a innovative new concept, I expect a lot of individual systems to be prototyped, scrapped, reworked. Let alone the effort needed for designing this thing. This is a startup with 20 People (17 of them now being layed off) operating for several years building a SHIP.

Anyone having numbers for typical effort/money/time/headcount spent in designing and building novel boats?

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Sure. My mother and her partner had a 70' motor catamaran built in Chile.

Custom job - designed by marine architect and customer. Custom hull, and mostly off the shelf running gear, big Cummins in each hull etc. Passagemaker, goes anywhere other than ice pack, huge range - they did a Pacific crossing a few years back without a refuel.

It took a team of 20 on/off (they work on a dozen or so boats concurrently), lots of calls and meetings, and cost about $2.5m all said and done. One would assume the shipbuilder made a decent profit. IIRC it didn't require much tweaking after sea trials.

The materials tend to be the cheap bit, it's skilled labour and design that costs you.

Well, the cost to an employer of 20 qualified engineers working for 3 years should be at least $10M. So you've spent >50% of that budget on just payroll + employee overhead.

So we have $9M left. There's a pair of 2000 shp turboshaft engines, something like the GE T700, costing around $2M total. Probably another $2M on drives and supercavitating propellers. Then there's all sorts of other equipment like radar, navigation, hydraulics etc. with $5M left. So I'm not sure it's entirely unreasonable.

But probably they're reporting a cost that's representative of what these would cost if someone went and ordered 10 of them.

Sure, if you got everything right on first try.

Is it just me, or does $19M sound ridiculously low for building a prototype of a military vessel?

Only because you've been desensitized by years of F35 budget overruns.

You underestimate the amount of markup that goes into a yacht. Most of that is in the interior and other stuff the occupants will see. This boat is a fraction of the size and likely got its entire interior from a government auction.

Without all the BigCo overhead you can build single prototypes with much less money.

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