[High-Tech] GURPS Industrial Economics (building on Low-Tech Companion 3)

[ericthered]

Originally Posted by Michael Thayne

Does anyone have a good sense of what the typical economy-of-scale curve looks like for manufacturing? Someone on Quora estimates the cost of a factory for a new car is around $600M. If you try to generalize this to some rule of thumb, maybe factory price = 20,000x retail price. That's a pretty silly rule, but might be useful for some purposes.

I suspect a proper rule gives incrementally cheaper products for exponentially higher startup costs. And the more you make, the cheaper, but its a long climb.

I'm debating features of that curve. If you make a thousand times more, what's the discount? 50%? 90%? Also, what factory size should give you the base cost for the item? And yes, the base factory size should vary by the item, but how do you do that and still minimize complexity?

I've got a curve set in place that uses the size and range table, reading multiples of 10 for each step, but even that feels a little steep: you get a x3 reduction in cost per item for making a thousand times more items, and that doesn't feel right.