The highlighted assertion is very wrong. What makes the cost of capital goods and materials? It is labor, just not in the final assembly factory, but further up in the production chain. In fact, raw material has NO value or cost, all cost are labor cost. That is a basic knowledge of economies. For example, gold has no value in its natural form in sands and earth, it ONLY become valuable when being dug out and minted by labor, it is expensive ONLY because it is extremely difficult to find it due to its rarity and labor intensive mining it.
J-20 5th Gen Fighter Thread VI
- Thread starter siegecrossbow
- Start date
- Status
Also no offense to anyone who mentioned about the 110m per unit for J-20 previously. I think yes there was some sort of number like this, but is just an estimation based on a 40-60m j-10 cost, and it’s not from an official source...
now we know j-10ce is just about 30m and if-17 is only 15, so...
now we know j-10ce is just about 30m and if-17 is only 15, so...
Brumby
Major
You are right.
$67 Billion is total program cost. The R & D is $32.4 Billion.
My bad.
When we talk about R&D we need to distinguish between development of components and systems, and developments of product. A lot of a project’s specific development costs, outside of components and systems development, come out of the system integration and product QCing process. That’s usually not treated as the same thing, budget wise, as general R&D, which is more exploratory and is meant to build up a firm or an entity’s technology/IP stock and base.
I think I can speak for the rest of us. We do NOT want any kind of figures out of unknown, unreliable (as TV host), nor from guesses without any backings of remotely creditable leaks, nor from just some people who float something.
You are not wrong, that’s why I was asking about where is this 4.4bn come from.
Chinese run a very different system than US, their RnD cost is separated funded and also separated developed by many programs in different institutions, universities and organizations. I’m sure there must be a total number of RnD cost and a J-20 specific RnD cost, but until the official revealed that number, it would unknown for us.
Because their revenue and production cost are separately calculated and not tailed to the RnD.
Thus why I’m very curious on those numbers
Brumby
Major
I disagree. I would lean towards inst argument because the cost structure which dictate cost are weighted towards materials and electronics in aerospace which are generally capital intensive. The raw materials may be labor intensive but they form a much smaller percentage of overall cost. This could be easily resolved by looking into the cost structure of aerospace manufacturing. .
I don't think that you get my point. Yes these capital intensive things cost more, but they are still labors, precisely man-hours of higher educated/trained people.
I made my reply specifically on Inst's notion " labor is less important as a cost factor than capital goods (large-scale 3D printer for titanium, for instance) and materials." In his assertion, he made labor and capital goods one vs. another as if capital goods is NOT a result of labor. But IMO it is just a highly concentrated labor work whose many parts are not directly visible.
I think maybe a more effective way to elaborate your point is to point out that just like labor input costs capital input costs for the same unit of capital goods aren’t always one to one across different countries, mainly if the price of labor is different. Specifically, capital goods that are *imported* from one country to another country would reflect capital cost/value ratio that can be compare one to one between both countries, but capital goods developed internally within a country will have different cost/value ratio from capital goods developed internally within another country if their labor and component goods costs for all the input goods that go into that capital are also different. That said, it’s not just labor costs that look different in those inputs for capital goods. It’s *also* local supply and therefore local price of inputs. Geography, while not as deterministic in a globalized economy, still does matter in influencing local costs through local supply. In China this is even more so the case because of currency and other forms of capital controls.
- Status