Thank you.
Perhaps a thread on "cost effectivenss" might be in order to avoid highjacking this one any further
Assuming anybody can really compare costs from country to country with war time economies
What might be possiable and what I don't believe I have seen elsewere is breaking down planes by fractions or percentages.
I may have this wrong but what I mean is what percentage of weight is airframe, what percentage is powerplant, what percentage is armament, what percentage is fuel?
It might give some insight into how some countries or designers veiwed certain atributes.
Why don't you start a separate thread?
I suspect the four variables easiest to nail down are - 'weight empty' (including engine but no fuel or oil or crew or ammo), 'engine weight' from various manufacturer specs (engine stand alone w/o fuel lines, etc), gun/ammo and fuel tank capacity. (as noted above)
Mission weights are different (obviously)
What will be nigh impossible is to get reliable cost breakdowns that are truly measurable against each other.
Nobody was buying or acquiring aluminum, etc, on a 'pegged' commodity market, labor expenses varied, how does one reflect tooling, overhead and plant costs? In the US depreciation standards are fine and dandy for machine tools and plants but not truly reflective with respect to what DoD Contractors PRICED the tooling - particularly after it had been written down for the Balance Sheets.. one of the reasons the DoD elected to purchase tooling as part of many contracts to eliminate a difficult to account for resource 'fee' for subsequent spares and production runs.
With a very long production run from one plant within a depreciation cycle (say Ingelwood for p-51) one may extract some decent numbers, but what about the Me 109? or Ta 152 (on the other end of the spectrum)? or B-17 made from multiple plants starting at different times and producing dissimilar blocks?
The unit labor hours are important, one may 'assume' a unit per pound cost for airframe 2024 sheet and extrusions by weight to arrive at a single airframe unit cost but it was a lot tougher for Germany to get enough raw material than it was for US and that has to enter into an actual cost estimate.
I screwed around with CLI/WBS Cost Accounting systems for DOD 7000.1 and .2 enough to still lose sleep trying to rationize the EXTREME philosophical differences at costing the same 3-Axis tooling down to Jeweler's lathes when I was running GE's part of AFCAM.
Net - airframe major subsystems data weights may be achievable, labor hours and learning curve on labor efficiencies may be achievable, a plug average materials cost for the airframe may be rational..but getting a TRUE Cost by a single Accounting Standard is a Holy Grail that probably may not be possible.
