Yep, exactly, and then from another source 9which i photocopied 20 years agao, and then forgot to record the book) which is simply entitled "Appendix - Further Statisitcs, the Germans were spending approximately 6500 RM of their 12000 RM R&D budget on radars and night fighter development in 1942. That kinda tells you just how big an investment the Germans were making on their air defence arrangements, and just how much was being diverted to combatting the night bomber offensive
The number sound bullocks, sorry... 6 500 000 000,- RM on night fighters and radar?! A Me 110 cost about 150 000 RM, including of course everything, cost of development, manufacturing, industry expansion and profit etc.
Thus 65 billion Reichmarks would alone buy you about
40.000 Bf 110s alone in 1942...
The numbers need to come down to reality. In 1942 for example the Germans produced about 3052 of their classic 8,8 cm FlaK guns, each came at 33 600,- RM, or about 102 million RM for the whole lot.
A considerable sum, but hardly breathtaking, for example the Bismarck class ships came at 196 million RM - for each of them!
The costs of bombing and anti-bomber hardware can be also fathomed by the amount of money the Germans were spending on their own bombers - the unit cost of a Ju 88 for example was for example somwhere between 167 192 Reichmarks in 1942, and they have built some 3094 of them in that year, for a total sum of 517 million RM. The 1337 He 111s built, for about 265 000 RM for each cost about 354 million RM in total.
Even neglecting that the price tag for the FlaK 8,8 is for an unknown date, and that it likely went down considerably through the war with mass production techniques use, the fact that we have compared the cost of relatively cheap medium bombers (and not the about twice or three times as expensive heavy bombers) its difficult to escape the fact that the Germans were spending about 8 times as much capital on their two main bomber types procurement than they have spent on FlaK guns (ca. 100 million RM for the main FlaK guns vs. 870 million on Ju88s and He 111). This puts the whole idea of that anti-aircraft weapons being anywhere near as costly as bombers in la-la-la realm..
Of course ammunition expenditure can be added to that, but I'd wager that the cost of ammunition for bombers (bombs tends to hold a LOT of explosive compared to AA shells) far exceeded AA expenditure. Cast iron shell bodies were a non issue, and assuming that each 8.8 cm AA shell held about 1 kg of explosives while a commonplace SC 250 bomb held 160 kg of TNT and was, you start to appreciate that we are talking about entirely different scales for the cost of bombing and defense against bombing. Even the 3.5 million heavy rounds of flak expanditure/month in 1944 that stone mentioned works out as an equivalent of about 3500 tons of explosives - the equivalent of explosives needed for about 22000 common SC 250 bombs. So if all explosives production used for the monthly expenditure of 3.5 million FlaK shells would be diverted for producing SC 250 bombs, it would be only enough for only about 2750 fully loaded He 111 sorties with eight bombs, or half or third that number if we are talking about heavy bombers.
To look at the issue at a cost vs cost basis for explosives, a Lancaster would carry, for example 14 000 lbs of bombs in the form of 14 x 1000 lbs MC bombs, each filled with 218 kg of explosives (each equivalent of
218 8.8cm shells filling). The total explosive cost was thus 3053 kg per bomber. This means that about 1146 such fully loaded Lancaster sorties would require as much ammunition as those 3.5 million heavy flak rounds fired at them per month in 1944 - and they actully flew, on avarage,
about 9500 a month... and roughly double, triple that number with the USAAF and VVS considered, at whom those Flak guns were also shooting at.
I got bored with digging down further, but at this point, for me,
the numbers pretty convincingly show that dropping bombs would be roughly nine times as costly than shooting at aircraft with AA guns.