Often those expensive rounds actually pay for themselves. You shoot one and the target goes down. You take a cheap dumb round and it may take 100 shots. (I don't know the real numbers, and if I did I couldn't use them here, but you can do some googling and find that this number is ballpark correct.) Assuming the dumb round is $500 it sounds like a great deal. A $50,000 dollar kill instead of and $800,000 dollar kill.
But that nasty enemy, he decides to send 100 cheap boats against you. It then takes 10,000 shots to get them all. Which won't fit in your magazine. And wears out the barrel of your cannon before you finish firing. And half of the boats get to you before you have time to fire all 10,000 rounds. Oh, and by the way you had to build an ammo transport ship to follow along and keep you supplied with all those cheap dumb rounds.
Suddenly those expensive rounds start sounding cheap. Even when amortizing the cost over a smaller than planned number of rounds.
You work at the Pentagon by chance?
You don't need to spend $800K for a hyper accurate smart weapon -- much cheaper weapons are every bit as accurate and can have a bigger or smaller warhead as needed. $800K for a 5 inch shell is insane anywhere on the planet!
Brian
Brian
I used to work in the defense industry. I have no objection to finding cheaper smart rounds. I had some contact with gun launched programs when I was working. Each gun has it's own environment, and just because something survives one doesn't mean it will survive in another. The numbers of g's, both longitudinal and lateral are really incredible.
Neither of us knows the features of the round developed for the navy so we can't say whether they were really necessary or not. But naval rounds do tend to have much stricter safety requirements (things like not going off even if hit by an incoming shell. Something about being out in the middle of the Pacific ocean with no place to stand but the ship you are on makes them pay a lot of attention to things like that.)
But the real key is that if you buy only a small number of rounds they will be expensive. Even if you decided that some existing round was good enough you would want to run some sort of test program to prove that there weren't any surprises. A really cheap test program costs millions of dollars by the time you pay for instrumentation, range rental, the targets and all the other hoorah. When you split those millions among a small number of rounds they are expensive. An earlier post pointed out that this was the case here.
As an additional aside, the toob version - the VI fuse mentioned before is an inspiring story of cleverness and drive. It wasn't easy. They tried literally dozens of ways to make the tubes survive before they were successful. And tried eight different manufacturers of the tubes. Only one manufacturer found the source of magic dust to make them survive. And then they ramped up to production at an unheard of rate for a military weapon. The resulting product had a pretty high failure rate compared to modern weapons. The first batch tested had 25% or more fail. No one really knows how many failed in actual combat use. Probably many percent or more. But even with that high failure rate they were far superior to the prior rounds.
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