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by jonknee 4279 days ago
It's amazing/depressing how cheap bombs are when they don't have to be smart.
3 comments

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

Actually, it's amazing how much they charge for bombs that are smart.
Actually, most smart bombs (JDAMs) are just old, dumb bombs with a new "tail kit" containing a GPS and guidance electronics.
A tail kit that costs almost 10 times as much as the bomb.
OK.

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

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.
You'll need radiation hardening, a more precise inertial measurement unit (six axis gyro), and extreme reliability and lifetime that no consumer electronics device provides. The labor and materials cost, plus electronics mentioned above, is a lot more than $300. I also doubt you'll find a single engineer with the required aerospace and electrical engineering skills - you don't build an flight control surface control system with some 'ninjas' working on node.js in SF in a year.

I also haven't gotten into the business and logistics costs of pulling this off, but consider the fact that there is not even a RFP for such a device in existence.

It needs disruption indeed, but not cheaper weapons. I can't imagine how much damage we'd do if it were cheap.
Hey, this is Hackernews, not Reddit. You can't just completely make shit up here.
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?
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.)

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