Excellent points TheEyes all things to think on. The costs of arc-reactors an repulsors and the effects on product cost was something I was considering, however how much effect that has on the total cost compared to the additional tech upgrades? IDK we'll see later. High tech IRL seems to double the cost of military things price wise...
Personally I tend to think of the Arc Reactor and Repulsor as having roughly the same cost/production stats. They are based off the same technology, going by the movies anyway, applied in different direction and are about the same size. So it seems reasonable to assume that a 100mm Repulsor costs the same as the standard (100mm) 5GW Arc Reactor and that they scale up the same.
So a 100mm Repulsor costs 50k and 0.3 production while a 10m Repulsor costs 5m and 30 production. So a Frigate with a 500GW Arc Reactor and 4 10m Repulsors it would add 25 million credits and 150 production.
Of course in comparison to your ship numbers that seems rather low. Maybe we should adjust how Arc Reactors and Repulsors scale, right now they appear to scale linearly in cost and production.
This seems to make sense in general but eezo costs are known to scale non-linearly with shipmass. However the rate of growth is unknown so for the initial analysis the non-linear growth of a eezo core will not be considered.
While ideally we would have three points for analysis we do have enough at two.
The Normandy drive cost 120b and was twice the size as normal for a ship it's size. If we assume that cost scales linearly for Eezo cores, which it probably does since the primary cost would be the Eezo, a normal frigate of 138m would have a drive core costing 60b.
With 12,000 fighter cores for 120b means a fighter core costs 10m. If we stick with your assume that fighters are 6m long, better then that 2m one from the picture
, then we can estimate how cost scales with mass.
Assuming mass increases with the cube of length, not likely to be that accurate since ME ships tend to be really long but stubby in the other directions, then a normal 138m frigate has 12,167 the mass of a 6m fighter and their drive core costs 6,000 times as much. So basically drive core cost increases at half the mass increase.
Applying this to the various sizes of ships:
100m frigate = 23 billion
~138m SR-1 = 60 billion * 2 (Tantalus)
~175m SR-2 = 122 billion * 2 (Tantalus)
400m Cruiser = 1,461 billion
~700m Cruiser = 7,831 billion
800m Dreadnaught = 11,689 billion
1000m dreadnaught = 22,830 billion
Eezo be
really expensive.
Carriers generally cost less than battleships by an amount I will be estimating at about 50% Though it may range from 37.5%-75%.
Makes sense. In ME they have this giant gaping holes where all the fighters go and don't have a massive spinal MAC.
Light 100m Frigate: ~1.56 Million production, ~463 Billion credits
Heavy 250m Frigate: ~24.4 Million production, ~7.2 Trillion credits
Light 400m Cruiser: 100 Million production, ~29.6 Trillion credits
Heavy 700m Cruiser: ~536 Million production, ~159 Trillion credits
Small 800m Dreadnaught: 800 Million production, ~237 Trillion credits
Large 1000m Dreadnaught: ~1.56 Billion production, ~462 Trillion credits
Honestly those figures seem
really high. Over the last 50 years the world has averaged 3.8% growth in real GDP and 2.1% in per capita GDP. Projecting those two trends into the future:
Real GDP = 74,699,258,000,000 * 1.038^160 = 74,699,258,000,000 * 390.46 = 29,167,073,087,682,635 = 29,167 trillion USD.
GDP per person = 10,486 * 1.021^160 = 10,486 * 27.8 = 291,560.4
Times 13,000,000,000 people gives 3,790,285,635,547,476 which is 3,790 trillion USD.
Lets go with the larger Real GDP figure of 29,167 trillion USD. If we assume USD to Credit parity then that is 29,167 trillion credits.
In 2013 the top 5 military spenders (by percentage of GDP) were :
- Saudi Arabia (9.3%)
- United Arab Emirates (4.7%)
- Russia (4.1%)
- USA (3.8%)
- South Korea (2.8%)
So I figure 5% is the most reasonable figure here. This puts the Alliance budget at 1,458 trillion credits. During 2010 the US military budget was broken down as such:
- Operations and maintenance = 283.3/683.7 = 41.5%
- Military Personnel = 153.2/683.7 = 22.4%
- Procurement = 140.1/683.7 = 20.5%
- Research, Development, Testing & Evaluation = 79.1/683.7 = 11.6%
- Military Construction = 23.9/683.7 = 3.5%
- Family Housing = 3.1/683.7 = 0.5%
Lets say the Alliance spent a big more on procurement, given how fast their fleet grew, and they spend 30% of their budget on it for 438 trillion credits a year.
By your figures a building 1.5 800m Dreadnaughts per year would consume 81% of the entire procurement budget. For comparison the largest single costing line item in the US military budget was the F-35 at ~8%.
Also you misremembered the details about the relationship between engines and total cost:
An F-22 has a flyaway cost of $150,000,000. Some googling tells me that the engines they use cost 10,000,000 each and since they have two that's a total engine cost of 20,000,000. That gives an engine cost to flyaway cost of 7.5.
An F-18 has a flyaway cost of 60,900,000 with google giving an engine cost of 4,320,000 each for a total of 8,640,000 which gives an engine to cost ratio of 7.
Given that the Gladius is a top of the line fighter it's probably more along the lines of the F-22's 7.5x if not a higher, since the F-22 is ~17 years old, multiplier such as 8x.
However I also demonstrated that this logic doesn't apply since in the case of the Scimitar a 10m drive core would mean a cost of 80m when it in fact cost 100m. However this doesn't really work since given the relative costings it makes sense that as a ship grows bigger the Eezo core makes up a larger and larger percentage of it's total costs.
Personally I figure instead what we should do is take the Virginia class submarine and use that as a base then add on the drive cost. The Virginia class is 115m long, so Frigate size, and costs 2.6 billion dollars. Applied to the various lengths:
100m frigate = 1,739m
400m Cruiser = 111,296m
~700m Cruiser = 596,477m
800m Dreadnaught = 890,368m
1000m dreadnaught = 1,739,000m
Now adding in the drive cores:
100m frigate = 1,739m + 23,000m = 24,739m
400m Cruiser = 111,296m + 1,461,000m = 1,572,296m
~700m Cruiser = 596,477m + 7,831,000m = 8,427,477m
800m Dreadnaught = 890,368m + 11,689,000m = 12,579,368m
1000m dreadnaught = 1,739,000m + 22,830,000 = 24,569,000m
Now of course this does mean that most of the cost is the Eezo. If that is an issue adding an extra 0 to the conventional cost does level it out a lot more:
100m frigate = 17,390m + 23,000m = 40,390m
400m Cruiser = 1,112,960m + 1,461,000m = 2,573,960m
~700m Cruiser = 5,964,770m + 7,831,000m = 13,795,770m
800m Dreadnaught = 8,903,680m + 11,689,000m = 20,592,680m
1000m dreadnaught = 17,390,000m + 22,830,000 = 40,220,000
At 20.6 trillion credits constructing 1.5x 800m Dreadnaughts would cost 30.9 trillion credits which comes to 7% of the total budget. Which seems much more reasonable, at least to me.
Now that we have ship costs I can work out the production costs based upon that. If we assume that the relationship between production and cost is the same as the Scimitar, which seems reasonable, then production costs would be:
100m frigate = 141,365 Production
400m Cruiser = 9,008,860 Production
~700m Cruiser = 48,285,195 Production
800m Dreadnaught = 72,074,380
1000m dreadnaught = 140,770,000
A single large Shipyard could build a 800m Dreadnaught in 7.2 months which would fit with building 1.5 Dreadnaughts a year considering that you likely couldn't start building right after the first is finished.
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