3 ms·
You're forgetting to price in the endless hours in consultation with the military brass, traversing all the red tape involved in dealing with devices that must
by davidbanham 12y ago
You're forgetting to price in the endless hours in consultation with the military brass, traversing all the red tape involved in dealing with devices that must interact with security clearances, etc etc.
- tesseract 12y agoAnd just plain low volume. There's no economy of scale with 385 units. Let's say the injection molding tooling costs $20k (cheap!) - that's over $50 per unit just for the plastic enclosure. Ditto for circuit board production, engineering time, software development, prototype and validation units, testing and qualification, and all the other things that go into a product that have setup charges or nonrecurring cost. Not to mention you'll get gouged on the components themselves if you're buying such a low quantity (and if any parts need to be mil-spec - I am guessing not in a device like this but who knows - then that drives up the cost even more).