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Cost estimation
Fri, 06/27/2008 - 04:44 — vincecate
I think good engineering takes into account cost estimation. I have started a wiki page for cost estimation. So far it just has a bit based on steel ship building info.
http://wiki.seasteading.org/index.php/Cost_estimation
"A couple of sources
"A couple of sources indicate that for ship building the materials are roughly half the costs and the labor and overheads are roughly half the cost. This means that we could estimate the costs as simply twice the steel cost. If steel is $1/kg and our structure is 500,000 kg, then a materials cost of $500,000 and a total cost of $1,000,000 could be estimated."
This to me seems like an extremely low estimate. Comparing it simply to building a boat doesn't take into account that boats are made from available parts, plans, and expertise. Seasteads will need many parts that are custom made for only this type of vessel. If anything, I would double that number for the basic structure without the costs of things like power and transportation.
comparibility of ship costs and seastead costs
Table 6.1 in the paper below says 60 to 70% of a ships cost is materials.
http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/maritime/maritime_industrial/doc/Shipbuil...
I agree that twice materials costs is extremely low for early seasteads. This does not count design costs, just shipyard costs. And early seasteads will probably have far less weight than typical ships, so overheads will be much more significant. I also agree that this would at best be the structure and not things like solar, engines, etc.
Just trying to get some handle on how to estimate costs.
A laudable goal, but i do
A laudable goal, but i do not think a ship is necesarily a good starting point.
Also, be carefull to distinguish between the costs of building a prototype vs a series produced thing.