[mendort]

They cost between 13k and 26k a piece in 2014 USD. That is truly amazing.

EDIT:

Even more amazing when you consider that they weighed about 10k pounds.

[jonknee]

It's amazing/depressing how cheap bombs are when they don't have to be smart.

[mendort]

huh.. you're right. I assumed that anything the military bought these days came with a 1/4 million dollar price tag, but the Mark 84 bomb is only about twice the price per lb of the pumpkin bombs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_84_bomb

[bd_at_rivenhill]

Actually, it's amazing how much they charge for bombs that are smart.

[hollerith]

Actually, most smart bombs (JDAMs) are just old, dumb bombs with a new "tail kit" containing a GPS and guidance electronics.

[mendort]

A tail kit that costs almost 10 times as much as the bomb.

[hollerith]

OK.

(La Wik says the US Air Force is currently paying $27,000 per tail kit.)

[demallien]

Wow. There's an industry in massive need of disruption. I'm thinking a mid-range android phone + some servos + software would do the trick. Let's say one year's dev for a reasonable engineer, so $100k + $300 in parts. Make a 1-Iraq-war-day's worth, and you'd have the unit price down to hundreds of dollars, not tens of thousands.

[samplonius]

Hey, this is Hackernews, not Reddit. You can't just completely make shit up here.

[mendort]

A mark 84 bomb, one of the largest conventional munitions in frequent use, costs about 3k a piece. The mark 84's smaller cousins are cheaper. JDAM kits costs about 27k a piece. How am I making things up?

[hollerith]

No one's making shit up in this thread.

A 500-pound dumb bomb consists of about 250 pounds of steel and 250 pounds of high explosive. Plus a fuze.

When manufactured in large quantities, $3000 in 2014 dollars seems like a reasonable cost.

(Most of the ones in the US Air Force's inventory were manufactured decades ago.)

[eplanit]

Why "depressing" that a device with little complexity costs less than one with much (smart implies much) complexity?