Weapons and Their Costs

[Jinumon]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

If you want to to design UT energy weapons there is an article by David Pulver in (I think )Pyramid #37 called "Laser and Blaster Design".

This is exactly what I needed. I'm running a Star Wars game and wanted to include more variety with Blasters. Magnifique!

[fredtheobviouspseudonym]

We don't know how production technology is going to change in the next 100 or 1000 years -- odds are that stuff will become cheaper to produce as smart people make money on improving production tech.

IIRC things can change quite a bit.

The M2 Browning heavy machine gun, a 1920 design (perhaps '21) originally needed a large number of skilled machinists to crank out parts from solid chunks of metal. In those days there were a fair number of machinists and the labor costs were pretty low.

The .50 kept on in production after WW II. Costs went up as skilled machinists became relatively scarce. For reasons I can't quite figure out the US and other armed forces were willing to pay premium prices for Ma Deuce. Other types of HMGs with stamped parts were not adopted (see Dover Devil.) [From http://www.secretprojects.co.uk/foru...,19011.0.html: "I was a member of the Special Projects Group in the second development phase and thought I would give the world a picture of [the Dover Devil]. . . It was estimated that the concept pictured could have been manufactured for $2500.00 each and at the time a M2HB was $10,060.00 each."]

By c. 1990 new laser-guided cutting machinery meant that you could use devices to produce the carefully-carved parts of the old M2 HMG and the production costs would have declined.

Short version -- too many variables in production costs to have a simple means to estimate costs.

[ericbsmith]

Originally Posted by fredtheobviouspseudonym

The .50 kept on in production after WW II. Costs went up as skilled machinists became relatively scarce. For reasons I can't quite figure out the US and other armed forces were willing to pay premium prices for Ma Deuce.

The reasons aren't really that hard to understand, and there are several I can think of off the top of my head. First, you have to consider retraining costs, not just for the weapon usage but also for the armours who maintain and repair the weapons. New guns mean new training. Second is the logistics cost; you either have to maintain double supply lines of parts (and possibly ammo) while you phase the old weapon and bring in the new or you have to pay a premium to do a complete replacement of all the current weapons in a short amount of time. The third reason is good old fashioned conservatism; the military, for obvious reasons, is extremely conservative when it comes to equipment and training. They don't make changes if they don't have to, and when they have something that's tried and true they need a very compelling reason to replace it.