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Comment by edgarallenbro | Hacker News Reader

$25,000 for a single projectile is "affordable"?

Why do I feel like I'm living in a madhouse?

A single-use anti-tank weapon costs $50,000, and worth every penny if you're the infantryman and the tank is heading toward you. Its dirt cheap at the cost, considering the price of a tank.

Same for the railgun. They are shooting at million-dollar targets.

"worth every penny if you're the infantryman and the tank is heading toward you"

To bad it isn't cheaper we could give every infantryman two! In all seriousness though if you are an infantryman in a Malaria infested swamp anti-malarial drugs are worth every penny too but the production of those are subject to competition so luckily they only cost pennies a pill and every soldier can have as many as needed. The missile's value to a soldier is not a justification for it's cost and if anything the high cost of something like that is detrimental because if it really is that great it means that not everyone can have one.

> Its dirt cheap at the cost, considering the price of a tank.

And the price of an infantryman.

The question is... how much does the railgun itself cost per shot? $25,000 per round is cheap enough, but what's the impact of each firing on the gun?

Missles and shells are expensive mostly because they have to propel themselves, but they benefit from the fact that that propulsion system only has to work one time. A useful railgun will need to be able to fire thousands of times without major maintenance before you'll start seeing any cost benefit to cheap ammunition.

Increasing the costs for other tax payers does not make it cheaper though. Furthermore, the weapons cost the same wether they are fired at an approaching tank, into the air, at a bunch of baby seals, or not ever. It's not like weapon peddlers buy back the unused stuff at full price, do they.

In a better world we'd not need weapons. But give these guys a break: this weapon is essentially all about the cost-cutting. It replaces million-dollar missiles, which are definitely single-use. It doesn't need resupplying with powder - it makes its own propellant (electricity). Each round takes around 1 cu ft, so a single ship can carry hundreds/thousands instead of a dozen.

This is you tax dollars at work, cutting costs for everybody.

That at best makes this the exception to the rule, and is a drop in the ocean. Yeah, it saves money. Kinda like cleaning a needle makes it more safer to inject heroin you found on someone who died of bad heroin. Technically, this is true, if you accept a few premises I personally don't buy into.

Do you really think this changed:

The business of buying weapons that takes place in the Pentagon is a corrupt business - ethically and morally corrupt from top to bottom. The process is dominated by advocacy, with few, if any, checks and balances. Most people in power like this system of doing business and do not want it changed. -- Colonel James G. Burton

And it also doesn't change the fact that how much value something destroys doesn't increase the value of it. If anything, it's how much value it protects that does. There's generally tax payers and demagogues on both sides, fucking their own populations much harder than their "enemies", and the more value gets destroyed in that process, the sadder the outcome for humanity. Exactly because it's all mostly a racket, such a mythos of heroism and adoring the technical excellency of it has been created, and because it's so shameful, people defend it so pettily, and uselessly. Like I would care about downvotes when speaking my conscience.

When they said that my immediate thought was, yeah a US missile costs millions but is that is representative of the cost of production of a Chinese missile? America's enemies don't buy their missiles from American defense contractors. They already produce electronics a good deal cheaper than the US and that isn't even considering the beltway bandit markup.

Also all the comments saying that this is cheap compared to some other US weapon that is probably similarly overpriced are just silly. These sorts of things are not subject to the kind of competition that normal goods are. Just look at the cost of space flight for companies like SpaceX and Virgin Galactic compared to NASA's which relied on defense contractors until SpaceX came along.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/09/27/us-turkey-china-de...

1 Tomahawk missile is approximately $500k (and up)

$25,000 to tear another ship apart at 7 times the speed of sound is a bargain.

Well, transfering money from tax payers into private hands is a lucrative business. Don't attribute insanity to what cold malice explains.

Because you are. I'm with PavlovsCat -- the relative price comparison is being used to sell extraordinary profits, and otherwise smart people just eat it up.

Considering that the rail gun projectile is basically a hunk of metal, $25k does seem really expensive. No gunpowder, nothing. All the work is in the railgun.

The projectile is a marvel of materials engineering. It has to accelerate to Mach 7 in a few feet, survive friction with the surrounding air for 100 miles, and have enough remaining core to deliver sufficient kinetic energy to be worthwhile.

Its definitely not just a chunk of barstock milled to a point.

This is the more interesting question to me, not "is it cheap in comparison to what it's targeting or the alternatives" but "is it cheap based on the cost of production".

25k for a hunk of metal does seem like a very strange price, perhaps there's something more exotic to it than meets the eye?

In terms of Defense budgets, that is indeed affordable.

Expenses for Exploration and Production (i.e. upstream oil & gas) operate on similar orders of magnitude.

In comparison to a million dollar missile? Yes.

$2,000 + $23,000 military-industrial complex fee.

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