I have given you facts backed up using primary or respected secondary sources. From 6/1/03 to 11/15/08 the average daily exchange rate has been 1.856. You are the one who brought up that a typhoon could be had for 60 million dollars, not me. You in turn accuse me of having an agenda all the while neglecting to back up anything you have said with any citations. Pretty laughable considering you have not backed up a word you have said with any source.
You are quite simply wrong in stating that a Typhoon could be had for 60 million USD and it was you who brought up dollars as well. In the future don't expect a reply from me unless you have some reliable sources to back up anything you say. The only agenda I have here is to point out your error.
Your "respected secondary sources" are speculative press reports, or press reports into which you read things they do not say (e.g. the Bloomberg report). You have made inferences for which there is no evidence, e.g. that the failure of a terse, deliberately lacking in detail press release to give a particular detail is proof that the the detail does not exits.
You have now claimed, despite it being visible in this thread that my first post was a reply to one mentioning dollar prices, that I introduced the US dollar into this discussion. You haven't noticed that I've consistently argued that dollar prices are misleading, because they're exchange rate dependent? Ah well.
BTW, the dollar is 1.5 to the pound (as I said!) not 1.4.
You've also misread what I said about the NAO report. I did not say that the NAO "UPC" includes
all fixed costs, nor that it includes development. I said it includes fixed costs for the production run, meaning production fixed costs, not development. We know that from other sources (not the NAO report itself, as it doesn't include a detailed breakdown), & that it also includes "capital charges" (i.e. notional interest), some of which will be spread across the whole production run, whatever that eventually turns out to be, We don't, because it does not give such a breakdown, know how much those costs are.
It is reasonable for the NAO to include those costs in total production cost, as it is trying to establish what the government is spending. That is its remit. It is therefore correct to dismiss the T1 & T2 contracts as bases for calculating production cost, for its purposes, since they don't include all the production investment, or the cost of the government agency managing the procurement. But if we are making comparisons with other aircraft programmes, we should
not include those costs in the unit price of the aircraft, because the published figures for US & other competitive programmes do not include such costs in the unit price.
What price you use depends on what you're using it for. You want to know the price to the British taxpayer, then you look at the total system price, including development. You want to know the cost to an export customer, then you look at either the contracts which have been signed (if you know the breakdown), or try to find out the marginal unit price & apply a suitable markup. The NAO price is neither. It is useful for internal accounting (what it's intended for!), but not in comparisons. And it isn't what export customers pay, which is supposed to be the current production price (i.e. the T1 price for Austria, T2 for the first 24 Saudi aircraft, plus whatever their local assembly line adds for the next 48), plus a 7% levy towards development costs (can be waived), & potentially plus an optional additional markup, if the market will bear it. And, of course, the cost of initial training, initial spares, manuals, & any essential support equipment.
