[Milsurplus] Re: [ARC5] Odd ART-13

[Peter Gottlieb]

That's not as crazy as it might sound at first.  Those radios were 
pushing the state of the art back then and made at high speed with a 
tremendous amount of engineering work going into each component.

Look today at the items being sold at DRMO and their acquisition costs. 
  I have a laser pulse cloud height instrument that is a box (about a 
foot cube) with several circuit cards and a laser assembly.  Cost to 
Uncle Sam was over $98,000.  Or how about the computer interface box 
from IBM?  A dozen cards and several power supply modules.  REALLY well 
made, 7 inch rack mount, and over $260,000.  Every piece of metal in 
that thing was made on a milling machine!  When you factor in the NRE, 
the production tooling, the mountains of documentation, the 
qualification and production tests including burn-in and rigorous 
individual tests, the custom test sets, spares, training, etc, that is 
what stuff ends up costing.  Of course a lot depends on the accounting, 
so for example the initial run might be 100 units and if it costs 
$10,000,000 to get those 100 out the door then you could say that each 
one costs $100,000 yet the next hundred might only cost $5000 each to 
produce.  Of course, many contracts are set up so that follow-up orders 
are at the same price as the initial order, and that spares from one 
contract may not be used in support of a different contract.  However, 
there is a net good effect of this subsidy of the electronics companies 
in that the whole US superiority in electronics was born of it.



Mike Morrow wrote:
> Robert wrote:
> 
> 
>>Yaah, but...that was 30+ years ago.  In 1970 you almost couldn't even give
>>them away.  There weren't many of us in those days who would have taken one
> 
> even
> 
>>as a freebie.  And in 1970 with a BSEE from a very good school, I think I
> 
> was
> 
>>making $750 per month and the brand new Land Rover I had just bought only
>>cost me $3495.00.  :-)
> 
> 
> 
> Speaking of relative dollar values and ART-13s, according to the Dept. of
> Commerce a dollar in WWII was worth about ten of today's in buying power.
> Walt Hudgens in an ER article about 15 years ago stated that his records
> showed that the ART-13 cost $14,400!  Could that be correct...an ART-13 cost
> nearly $150,000 of today's dollars???
> 
> I've seen numbers somewhere indicating that even a lowly SCR-274-N receiver
> with dynamotor cost the government about $400.  If so, then it took the
> equivalent of $4000 of today's dollars to buy one.  I seem to recall that
> the initial US Federal budget estimate to prosecute WWII was $770 billion
> 1941 dollars.  I don't know how that compares to what it actually took.
>