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I found out a few weeks ago they made a bunch of those bombs, minus the nuclear elements, for training. They even dropped some on Japanese targets and found the

• mendort 12y ago
  They cost between 13k and 26k a piece in 2014 USD. That is truly amazing. EDIT: Even more amazing when you consider that they weighed about 10k pounds.
  • jonknee 12y ago
    It's amazing/depressing how cheap bombs are when they don't have to be smart.
    • bd_at_rivenhill 12y ago
      Actually, it's amazing how much they charge for bombs that are smart.
      • hollerith 12y ago
        Actually, most smart bombs (JDAMs) are just old, dumb bombs with a new "tail kit" containing a GPS and guidance electronics.
        • mendort 12y ago
          A tail kit that costs almost 10 times as much as the bomb.
          • hollerith 12y ago
            OK. (La Wik says the US Air Force is currently paying $27,000 per tail kit.)
            • demallien 12y ago
              Wow. There's an industry in massive need of disruption. I'm thinking a mid-range android phone + some servos + software would do the trick. Let's say one year's dev for a reasonable engineer, so $100k + $300 in parts. Make a 1-Iraq-war-day's worth, and you'd have the unit price down to hundreds of dollars, not tens of thousands.
              • personalcompute 12y ago
                You'll need radiation hardening, a more precise inertial measurement unit (six axis gyro), and extreme reliability and lifetime that no consumer electronics device provides. The labor and materials cost, plus electronics mentioned above, is a lot more than $300. I also doubt you'll find a single engineer with the required aerospace and electrical engineering skills - you don't build an flight control surface control system with some 'ninjas' working on node.js in SF in a year. I also haven't gotten into the business and logistics costs of pulling this off, but consider the fact that there is not even a RFP for such a device in existence.
                • rdtsc 12y ago
                  Even if you do that and build one. You'll need to spend many many times over that budget lobbying, making friends, getting noticed and networking, formalizing through red tape and so. Imagine today you have that device in your table. Ok. What is your next step. Just show up at the Pentagon with it in your bag? A lot of that costs money (unfairly probably) and that is one of the reasons soldiers sometimes end with crappy hardware that costs some astronomical amounts.
                • bd_at_rivenhill 12y ago
                  Radiation hardening is a requirement to protect the arsenal from EMP attacks in a large scale conflict with a nuclear component. This will hopefully be a rare or nonexistent occurrence, and hardening should not be considered a requirement for bombs used on Al Qaeda and IS (and nearly all other expected enemies). There is a place for radiation hardened munitions in the arsenal for deterrance, and there is also a place for some that are not, and these should be the ones we drop in "low intensity" conflicts, with the occasional release of a hardened munition to act as a quality control test. Reliability is obviously a concern, but the procurement process should force contractors to open their designs to qualified competitors after a certain period of monopoly profits to recoup their research expenses, sort of like the same way that brand name drugs are eventually forced to compete with generics. Just because these designs are generally national security secrets doesn't mean that the original developer should own the equivalent of an infinite patent on the technology.
          • samplonius 12y ago
            Hey, this is Hackernews, not Reddit. You can't just completely make shit up here.
            • mendort 12y ago
              A mark 84 bomb, one of the largest conventional munitions in frequent use, costs about 3k a piece. The mark 84's smaller cousins are cheaper. JDAM kits costs about 27k a piece. How am I making things up?
            • hollerith 12y ago
              No one's making shit up in this thread. A 500-pound dumb bomb consists of about 250 pounds of steel and 250 pounds of high explosive. Plus a fuze. When manufactured in large quantities, $3000 in 2014 dollars seems like a reasonable cost. (Most of the ones in the US Air Force's inventory were manufactured decades ago.)
    • mendort 12y ago
      huh.. you're right. I assumed that anything the military bought these days came with a 1/4 million dollar price tag, but the Mark 84 bomb is only about twice the price per lb of the pumpkin bombs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_84_bomb http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_84_bomb
    • eplanit 12y ago
      Why "depressing" that a device with little complexity costs less than one with much (smart implies much) complexity?