And now time for something completely different: Remember USS Zumwalt? The one with the futuristic long-range gun systems, that got showcased in half of Hollywood movies? Yeah, the only projectile that was being developed for them just got canned by Congress due to exorbitantly high costs ($ 800 000 per shell?!) It seems that it has fallen victim to a vicious cycle "reduce quantity of stuff => higher cost per unit => justification for even further reduction in quantity", due to a drastic reduction in number of Zumwalts planned (from 28 to 3).
So now the most futuristic destroyer of USA will have no ammunition for its main weapon.
Has the sequestration gone too far?
The US weapon industry is really starting to make a name for itself for driving up prices that were high to start with to ridiculous, as projects drag on. Our Dutch governments of the past say 16 years have been fighting over and over again with the opposition about the damn JSF costing more and more billions, not in the least because of the many technical flaws initial designs had and still have. We never should have ordered the darn things and should have gone for the Eurofighter instead.
Reduction of quantity ordered has not happened yet, but I get where this Congress decision is coming from.
If it takes too much longer for the JSF to be delivered fully operational, and budgets are exceeded again, opposition parties in the customer countries might just do the same to JSF as what happened to the Zumwalt.
It has little to do with anything the contractors are doing (except for the delays in the F-35 program, because building a fighter to fulfill three separate and mutually-exclusive design goals wasn't idiotic enough, so they decided to put the thing into production while still working on the design for some stupid reason) but because orders are constantly getting cut. If it takes $200,000,000 worth of design work and factory tooling to design a new weapon, and $3,000,000 in parts and labor to build it, your per unit cost is 203,000,000 if you build only one. If you build 10, the cost is $23,000,000 a unit, and if you build 100 it is $5,000,000 a unit, because the up front costs have to be taken into account for the overall cost of the project.
In this particular case, the guns on the new the Zumwalt-class ships are the only ones that will use them, there were supposed to be 28 Zumwalt-class destroyers built, with 100 of the new rounds in the magazine (plus 900 more conventional rounds). 25 of those ships were cancelled (partially due to cost overruns, and partially because the older Arleigh Burke class has better ABM capability), and at least one of those three is slated to serve as a railgun testbed instead of mounting the fancy conventional cannon. This means that projected demand was reduced by about 90%, so the development cost will not be spread out the way they wanted it to be.
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Topic: Doc Helgoland's Asylum for the Politically American: T+0 (Read 1422546 times)