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Comment by ChrisMarshallNY | Hacker News Reader

> In today's money the aircraft, from design to completion, cost the equivalent of $55.6bn (£41.2bn).

F-35: "Hold my beer."

Interesting comparison. A B-29 could carry up to 20,000 lbs of bombs. An F-35 in full loadout with external hardpoints can carry up to 22,000 lbs

Interesting, and the F35 isn't even designed as a bomber (though it is very multirole)

Seeing one fly low at an air show in San Francisco was insane. The power of that single engine…

The F-35 is 3 planes in one platform and cost something like 70 billion $ to design.

To quote a military friend of mine: "Why build 1 plane when you can build 3 planes for the cost of... does math... 3x!"

"First rule of government spending... why build one, when you can have two, for twice the price!" -Contact, 1997

That was never the intention of course. But I guess there are still benefits of scale like maintenance parts, training etc.

My fear would be that with current US acquisition, it would have been 3x 50 billion instead.

Hope it's far better than the F-111, another tri-service bird. The F-4 turned out ok, but it wasn't designed tri-service as I recall.

I’ve heard much higher figures; approaching 1 trillion dollars.

That's the estimated total cost of the joint strike fighter program including research, acquisition, and maintenance, up to its current intended retirement in the 2060s

Fair point, but we should look at the length of time from napkin sketch to first delivery of final product; not just the design.

I understand that the manufacturing and testing was a nightmare, with the need to redesign multiple subsystems.

If the estimated unit cost of ~90-110 million dollars is right, I'd argue it's a pretty big success. The absolute cheapest 4th generation fighter would cost you an order of 20-30 million dollars to import brand-new, whereas 4.5th generation platforms like the Rafale commonly fetch 100m+ a unit to import.

As far as credible 5th generation strike fighters go, that's a pretty cheap per-squadron price tag. My bigger gripe is with the "Big Bomb Diplomacy" tactics that require such a platform, but we'd end up wanting one either way if a fight with China is in the cards.

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